
Facebook retires Nuclide Atom extension - malmaud
https://blog.atom.io/2018/12/12/facebook-retires-nuclide-extension.html
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anontechworker
I went in for an interview recently for the react core team and the guy who
interviewed me said Facebook was trying to edge away from open source. He
mentioned it’s not worth it to them as much as it was before. Too much to
maintain.

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saagarjha
I’m surprised to see an engineer admit this during _an interview_ (assuming it
is true, sophiebits has mentioned that it she doesn’t agree with this).
Presumably this is the time when you talk about how much cool open source work
you do?

~~~
ldiracdelta
An engineer at a big company is still just a dude or a gal. Not everyone in a
multi-thousand person company will toe the company line or are in lock step.

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mraison
I will really miss the remote development experience. It didn't get a lot of
visibility because Nuclide's scope was much broader. It was also a pain to
setup (compiling Watchman from source on Linux servers...) but after the
initial setup it was way better than anything else out there (FUSE mounts,
rmate, etc). Hopefully VSCode will get there soon.

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jtolds
Wait, so with Github taking complete responsibility for Atom, that means Atom
and VSCode are now ultimately run/sponsored by the same company (MS)?

~~~
minton
Despite claims to the contrary, I fully anticipate the (slow) death of Atom.

~~~
h1d
Is Electron maintained separately from the Atom team?

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s_m
I've been out of the React Native loop, but I seem to remember Nuclide was
FB's canonical IDE for React Native and Hack - does that mean there's not an
official way of using those environments any more?

~~~
vjeux
In the past, a new platform required a new language which required a new IDE.
Fortunately those days things less tied together. React Native is mostly using
JavaScript which can be productively edited with a lot of editors and IDEs.

So the fact that Nuclide was there didn't mean that you had to use it (and the
vast majority didn't) in order to write React Native.

~~~
pandeiro
I find this a little disingenuous, since React and React Native documentation
rarely if ever feature code examples in any actual flavor of standard
JavaScript and the 'blessed' way of writing React app involves quite a bit of
embedded XML (JSX), which editors need to know how to deal with.

~~~
alex504
To be fair any modern IDE or text editor that supports JavaScript supports JSX

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dzonga
Kill Flow while at it.

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haney
I’m a relatively happy user of flow. Is your objection to typed JavaScript or
to the fact that flow is not Typescript?

~~~
kumarharsh
I don't want Flow to exactly die, but I wish Facebook have since love to
running Flow on Windows, especially things like making Flow run faster and
improving the VSCode plugin. Yeah maybe FB doesn't use any Windows machines,
but it's claimed that Flow has full support for Windows. The reality is that
Flow runs very very slow on Windows.

So in a way, I do object that Flow is not Typescript - I wish it had as much
cross-platform viability as Typescript.

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philosopherlawr
So, does this mean Facebook is adopting VS Code?

~~~
underwater
Apparently not:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696](https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696)

~~~
amasad
Nuclide replaced FBIDE, the internal pre-setup web IDE that Facebook used.
Having a pre-setup environment is a huge productivity boost:

\- dev env onboarding takes a minute instead of a week

\- employees can code "on the go"

So predictably, if they get rid of Nuclide there needs to be an alternative
and doubtful they've built something new because... why.

~~~
vjeux
Nuclide has always had a ton of value for Facebook itself as we could build a
lot of Facebook-specific integrations and ship a new version to all the
developers every week. It's now the most used editor at Facebook.

This announcement is about the open source version of Nuclide, which has never
received a lot of love and didn't have a lot of adoption.

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mirekrusin
What are teams developing on flow recommended to use now at Facebook?

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rattray
Hopefully they invest in flow-for-vscode, which has the potential to reach
parity with VSCode's amazing TS support: [https://github.com/flowtype/flow-
for-vscode](https://github.com/flowtype/flow-for-vscode)

~~~
kangax
This is much needed. The extension has been broken for our team for a couple
months now. No clear resolution. The Flow suggestions in an editor are
basically unusable right now.

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twoheadedboy
I guess it's finally time to switch to VS Code then.

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k__
Ran horribly slow for me anyway, so no big loss.

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imbiased
Can you update the title to add Atom IDE?

Perhaps more important than Nuclide itself are the Atom IDE extensions which
are also being retired. [https://ide.atom.io/](https://ide.atom.io/)

~~~
straws
It would seem that [https://github.com/atom/atom-
languageclient](https://github.com/atom/atom-languageclient) is still under
active development. Hopefully this means that the core Atom team will continue
to work on language server features.

~~~
maxyme
A fairly substantial PR was accepted recently to integrate the typescript
server as the language client for atom-ide: [https://github.com/atom/ide-
typescript](https://github.com/atom/ide-typescript)

It appears the project isn't dead, but there aren't any Facebook maintainers
working on it (and there haven't been for nearly a year).

~~~
imbiased
Ok sorry, the atom-ide-ui package is dead. I’m not sure how the IDE features
are split between the ui and individual language server packages

