Curious as to when you had this problem, I thought the manual was fairly descriptive: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#types-reference-and-pointer-types ht

Curious as to when you had this problem, I thought the manual was fairly descriptive: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#types-reference-and-pointer-types https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#types-reference-and-po... I'm sure your original question was more nuanced, but for anyone wondering about this basically any ref type is heap allocated, and you do this by calling new, so: type MyType = ref object var myHeapObject: MyType new myHeapObject Pretty much anything else is stack allocated and doesn't need the GC if I remember right.