Announced three months ago during the F8 developer conference, Facebook has open sourced the code for their Nuclide IDE. Nuclide is based on Atom, adding a number of packages without changing anything in the core of GitHub’s IDE.
Nuclide is a development tool for those using Facebook’s technologies: PHP, Hack, JavaScript, and Flow. Besides integrating these technologies into one IDE, Nuclide offers support for remote development by connecting to a server via SSH. The server is a Node.js package integrated with Watchman, which monitors for file modifications. Local development is also possible.
As expected, Nuclide provides support for Hack development including syntax and error highlighting, autocomplete, linting, type checking, type hints, and go-to-definition. Some of these features are also supported for PHP, JavaScript and Flow development.
Since Facebook uses Mercurial as their main revision control system, it is no surprise that Nuclide is integrated with it. Changes in the codebase are highlighted with colors in the editor.
The tool’s roadmap includes support for iOS development and integration with React and React Native. Facebook intends to make Nuclide the tool of choice for other technologies they are using: Buck, Infer, Relay and GraphQL. Support for debugging is also planned.