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by gfasdgsfd 4187 days ago
It looks like mingw provides a non-installer version of the binaries, although it is (unintentionally) well hidden in the web. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%2...
1 comments

I see that, thanks. It's a zipped dump of all pieces for all OSes. If you're a Nim dev, please don't let this dissuade you from eventually releasing a portable "ready to go" version of Nim for Windows.

I know myself and my compatriots bail at any language that forces Cygwin or MinGW and has its own installer on top of that. I'll never get to try OCaml, Haskell, Kitten [which looks really interesting but relies on Haskell], and a number of other new languages just because of the install burden.

IMO, if trial and adoption are your goals then as little friction as possible to get to "hello world" is a good route. (And an unzip to the directory of your choice then a double click on "Test_Hello_World.bat" are about as good as you could get.)

It's not the same thing at all, but could you use Virtualbox to run a Linux VM on Windows, and play around with languages in that?