Facebook open-sources its Nuclide IDE based on GitHub’s Atom text editor

Facebook today is releasing its Nuclide integrated development environment under an open-source license.

Facebook first unveiled Nuclide at its F8 developer conference in March. In recent weeks the company gave early access to a limited number of people, but now it’s available to everyone for free.

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With Nuclide, Facebook has sought to simplify native mobile app development and go beyond both other IDEs (such as AppCode and Eclipse) and simpler text editors (such as GitHub’s Atom, which Nuclide builds on top of). The idea is to pack the power of IDEs while cutting down on the time developers can spend starting them, recovering from crashes, and indexing code.

Nuclide is just the latest Facebook software to become available to developers in recent years. Others include HHVM, Hive, Infer, Presto, and RocksDB.

Nuclide was designed to support Facebook’s own React JavaScript library and its React Native framework, but it can also handle web and native mobile application development.

Migration to Nuclide will be easy for those using Atom — it’s just a series of packages for Atom.

“We’ve been able to avoid forking the editor’s code, so Nuclide will install on a recent, regular version of Atom and users can continue to benefit from other community packages alongside Nuclide’s,” Facebook software engineer Michael Bolin wrote in a blog post on the news.

Nuclide includes universal search, auto-completion, and error highlighting features. It supports Mercurial, Hack, Flow, and connections to remote servers through SSH.

And there’s more to come.

“Support for the iOS, React, and React Native use cases are all on the near-term package roadmap,” Bolin wrote. “We know debugging is important on both the server and mobile sides, and Nuclide will automatically grow in functionality as the underlying tools like Buck and Infer do. Finally, we are also excited to start supporting forthcoming patterns like Relay and GraphQL as important first-class citizens in the suite.”

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Find Nuclide on GitHub here.