[tinfoilhatter]

> re personal compiler development playground: I don't see this for Nim 2. Nimony/Nim3 is more of a "playground", but rightfully so: he is creating a new major version of the language and aiming to improve the architecture of the compiler.

Araq likes to work on the shiny flashy things he finds fun / interesting to work on. I'm not going to fault him for that, but things like atomics on Windows are still broken. People have been complaining about the stdlib and documentation + lack of a formal specification for at least a decade.

> From what I can tell the fork seems to be due to differences in direction of the language and w.r.t working together: differences in communication styles. But again, I don't know.

There was quite a bit of drama that caused the hard fork to materialize. Differences in communication styles is definitely describing the drama that unfolded, extremely mildly. I don't work on the fork or use it, but some of the more talented compiler developers who were previously contributing to Nim, left Nim to go work on Nimskull.