Current status of nu language

[Fredrik Andersson]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out the current status of the language. The site programming.nu have no apparent activity since Sep 2011. The latest download is from the same time. However the last activity on GitHub is only 25 days ago.

There is a discussion about blocks compatibility with iOS/OS X and a bug somewhere. Possibly have Philip solved the issue? But browsing commit history doesn't really provide any info (admittedly, I have not browsed any but Tims master branch). Point is that I am uncertain what version I should install.

Is Nu production ready for iOS and OS X? The survey that Tim started in this group suggest that Nu is for play time only and no serious work?

Could someone provide me a link to information about the current status? Does it work in Mountain Lion? Can I publish iOS 6-apps written with Nu on the AppStore? Does anyone work on any wrapper library to rid of the gigantic proportions of verbosity in Cocoa?

The RubyMotion platform have gained enormous momentum. I think RubyMotion is awesome. But I would like to see this project have the same momentum for several reasons. Mostly because I'm tired of Ruby and find Lisp intriguing, but also because the possibility to write servers with the same platform. 

Please update me (and other newcomers)

Regards

Fredrik

[Tim Burks]

Hi Fredrik,

Thanks for your interest.

I haven't seen much activity related to RubyMotion in the Silicon
Valley developer community, but I'm sure that many Ruby-using web
developers would find it attractive.

I don't track what others are doing with Nu, but I can say that I'm
actively using Nu to build iOS apps and to create web apps and
services that run on OS X. In fact, much of the infrastructure for a
conference that I'm organizing is written with Nu. Please check it out
(linked below).

Tim
--
Renaissance: the art and science of apps. January 21-23, 2013 in San
Francisco. http://renaissance.io

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[Johannes Goslar]

Hi Fredrik,
being only able to talk about my circumstances, but still could help you a bit:
To get blocks on iOS you need a newer libffi version, I included that in my repo (and some other minor fixes): https://github.com/ksjogo/nu
Nu seems stable to use for production and App Store compatible (e.g. my Frantic Frankfurt is using it).
The question is, if it helps your production enough to be worth the hassling. I am using it to define a DSL for my game to be able to write different game modes easily, which is working well so far. Moving greater parts of the logic to Nu was hindered by not having any debugger. But having a more flexible repl for the iOS-Simulator than gdb/lldb is really nice.

Regards
Johannes

[Fredrik Andersson]

Hi Tim,

That does sound promising. I shall look further into this.

However I still think that the community and especially newcomers would benefit greatly from a single source of information. All these forks on github is very confusing. Perhaps some tutorials on how on web, iOS and Mac projects?

Fredrik

[Fredrik Andersson]

Thank you Johannes,

The lack of debugging info is quite a showstopper for production projects. 

However, I will checkout your fork.

Fredrik

[Fredrik Andersson]

I just compiled a iOS-project with Nu. I apologize for being ignorant before, because it was dead simple. For future reference to anyone reading, these were my steps:

1. Create new iOS-project

2. Install cocoapods http://cocoapods.org/ and follow instructions

3. Create Podfile with content

platform :ios

pod 'libffi', '~> 3.0.11'

4. Run pod install and open the new .xcworkspace file (as instructed by the pod install command)

5. Add the two (!!!) files that is the Nu source to your project. They live in the objc folder.

6. Follow the instructions Option 2 or Option 3 that Tim provides at http://programming.nu/usage

The files in step 5 were pulled from ksjogo (https://github.com/ksjogo/nu). I have not yet tested but I suspect that Tims repository will be just as fine.

Hope this helps someone to get over the threshold!

Regards

Fredrik