Nim usage on GitHub
I was digging through some platform data today and thought I'd take a look at stats for Nim: as of Aug. 2025, there are 29k source repos (no forks, no archives, no spam) that have Nim as a primary or secondary language. Repos created per week have a slight upwards trend (first graph), and the cumulative growth is steady.
On GitHub we detect a repo's primary language using linguist (which can be customized or overwritten using git attributes). However, many more repos feature more than one language. In orange (57%) are the repos that have a different primary language but feature some Nim, and below that is a breakdown of the most common additional languages:
Putting this into perspective, we host1 significantly more than 100,000,000 repos that contain JavaScript (without even counting embedded in HTML, TypeScript or other variants). Still, at rank 212 of 711 recognized languages, Nim is slightly more popular than other niche languages including LiveScript (27k), V (25k), Crystal (22k). OTOH, all of Zig, COBOL (yes, really), AppleScript, Coq, and Ada have a 2x or larger footprint than Nim. Maybe not surprising, given some of those have had a multi-decade headstart.
I should also mention that this is merely a snapshot. The growth rate for all languages is different, and so are distributions in active contributions. Once a year, we aggregate all of these factors into the Top 10 languages in the Octoverse report. Needless to say, Nim doesn't make the cut.
Cheers ☕
Again, source repos only, and also excluding self-hosted GitHub Server instances. This is an undercount, but the ratios are stable.↩