Nu Seems Stable (by Jason Grossman)
I've been nagging Tim to say something about the stability of recent releases of Nu, so he asked me to write this.
Nu is a new language (no pun intended — see below for the etymology of the name Nu). It hasn't yet formed the basis of an impressive suite of stable software, and you'd think hard before using it to write anything mission-critical.
Despite that, it is actually rather stable. Let me say more about why.
vi tips for Nu
I'm collecting some tips for using the vim code editor with Nu.
What’s Nu?
Nu is an interpreted object-oriented language. Its syntax comes from Lisp, but Nu is semantically closer to Ruby than Lisp. Nu is implemented in Objective-C and is designed to take full advantange of the Objective-C runtime and the many mature class libraries written in Objective-C. Nu code can fully interoperate with code written in Objective-C; messages can be sent to and from objects with no concern for whether those messages are implemented in Objective-C or Nu.
Nu currently requires Mac OS X version 10.5 or greater and runs on PowerPC and Intel systems. Ports to Linux and the Apple iPhone are also available; contact me directly or visit my blog for more details.
Nu-0.4.0
See the downloads page for this long-overdue update to Nu.
The most visible change in this release is that the macro operator has been switched to refer to macro-1 instead of macro-0 (the original Nu macro facility). That is deprecated but kept for compatibility.
Support for garbage collection is now compiled in by default (Mac OS only).
We've also been making good progress running Nu on Linux-based systems. Currently a few small sites (including Tim's blog) are running with Nu on Rackspace Cloud Servers. See notes/DEBIANINSTALL in the Nu source distribution for details about building for Debian.
Macros
Thanks to Jeff Buck and Issac Trotts, we have some nice changes coming to Nu macros.
The changes are modeled on the description of macros in Paul Graham's On Lisp, so our new macro facility should feel familiar to experienced Lisp programmers.
Currently the changes are in my (Tim's) git repository, and they'll be included in the next release of Nu (0.4.0).
For more detail, see Jeff's excellent tutorial.
Nu-0.3.3
See the downloads page for this update to Nu.
This version mainly adds community-contributed updates:
- math-related enhancements from Brian Chapados and Issac Trotts.
- an OCaml-style pattern matching macro from Issac Trotts.
- nuke improvements from Jason Sallis.
- behind-the-scenes cleanup by Elizabeth Kellner to support Apple's Objective-C Garbage Collector. Garbage collection is not supported in the release build, but is available with a small change in the Nukefile in Nu builds from source.
Nu-0.3.2
Here's a quick update that makes it easier for newcomers to get the latest Nu. With this version, all of the examples in the Cocoa Programming with Nu repository should work, plus there are many other small enhancements detailed in the commit logs.
Available on the downloads page.
Cocoa Programming with Nu
To mark the release of the third edition of Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X, there is a new git repository on github to contain translated examples. To get started, I've posted an example from one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 28 (Web Services), and will add more over time. If you'd like to help, please do! Just fork the github repository, add your conversions, and send me a pull request. Let's see how quickly we can get this covered!
Here's the repository: Cocoa Programming With Nu.
Nu-0.3.1
This small release mainly brings in changes added for the iPhone and Linux ports, but also contains a few bug fixes and enhancements. With these changes, it is now possible to run the Nunja web server with the binary installed Nu.
Please see the commit logs for details. Available on the downloads page.
Announcing Nu: The Video
Many thanks to Jonathan Rentzsch for posting this video of my talk from last summer's C4[1] conference!
Nu on github
Along with the Nu git repository, there is a growing number of Nu-related projects on github.
Some of the projects that I've posted include:
- Nunja, a libevent-based web server that I've tested on MacOS and Linux.
- The NuPagePacker example Cocoa application.
- A NuiPhone project containing an iPhone "Hello World" in Nu.
- NuTcl, a wrapper for John Ousterhout's Tcl interpreter. You can use it to embed Tcl in a Nu/Objective-C application and create new Tcl commands with Nu. This has also been tested on both MacOS and Linux.
- NuMySQL and NuPostgreSQL, primitive but usable interfaces to the MySQL and PostgreSQL database systems.
- NuYAML, Patrick Thomson's YAML-processing package.
- NuMarkdown, Grayson Hansard's Markdown package.
Patrick has also posted Nuki, early work to build a wiki with Nu, and Grayson recently posted NuSmartyPants, another text formatting package.
github is proving itself to be a great way to collaborate. Come join us!
