[e12e]

As for scripting: I just tested on Debian Jessie, and at least for trivial code (read: not nim itself) -- nim seems quite content to work with tcc. Tcc is a pretty awful choice for c compiler in general -- but while my current desktop is a little too fast to be able to tell -- nim w/tcc was typically as fast on first compile (read: compiler not cached in ram) as clang/gcc were on second run). Honestly, on this box:

    time ./bin/nim --cc:tcc c -r examples/hallo.nim

vs

    time ./bin/nim --cc:gcc c -r examples/hallo.nim
    time ./bin/nim --cc:clang c -r examples/hallo.nim

is a toss-up -- and they all lose against:

    time python3 -c 'print("Hello, world")'

(by an order of magnitude that ends up being almost insignificant, it's ~0.5 seconds for clang/gcc on first run, ~0.2 seconds for tcc and ~0.02 seconds for python). But the binary tcc makes runs in ~0.001 -- or basically too fast to time -- gcc/clang versions are presumably faster).

Normally I think the startup time for python is less than instant (especially without dropping some standard includes/search with -sS) -- but apparently when running on a quad-core i7 at ~4Ghz with the OS on an SSD -- it makes no practical difference. I'll try later on my slower laptop (which is slow enough that "python -c "print('hello')"" doesn't feel quite instant) -- but the main point I wanted to make was that nim -c -r with --cc:tcc makes for a quite usable "scripting" tool, thanks to tcc's compilation/startup/parsing speed (if nim w/gcc/clang wasn't fast enough already).