Facebook retires its open source contribution to Nuclide, Atom IDE, and other associated repos

Yesterday, the Facebook Open Source team announced that they will no longer be able to contribute to the open source development of the Nuclide extension, Atom IDE, and other associated repos.

https://twitter.com/fbOpenSource/status/1072928679695548416

Nuclide is a code editor built as a suite of features on top of the Atom text editor to provide hackability and the support of an active community. Facebook developed Nuclide to provide a first-class unified development environment for React Native, Hack, and Flow projects. Nuclide was first created for Facebook’s internal engineers and then was later open sourced in the hopes that others could also benefit from it too.

In their announcement, Facebook told that this decision was made because they were not able to pay much attention to the project. They added, “However, our team has not been able to give this project the amount of attention and responsiveness it deserves and as a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Nuclide and associated repos, such as the Atom-IDE packages.”

Though they are not going to contribute to the Nuclide open source project, Facebook will continue to use it internally:

https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696

The latest release, that is, Nuclide 0.366 will be the last release by Facebook. They have made its source code available in the Facebook Open Source Archive. The language and debugging services will still be supported in Atom and other compatible IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code or the clients listed on Langserver.org.

Users on Hacker News are speculating that maybe this is the time to adopt VSCode and the main reason is that it provides good integration with TypeScript. Here’s what a user said, “A shame, in an ideal world there would be the benefit of outside contributions that made less internal work needed, so overall would be a win for Facebook. But probably this is related to Atom itself being taken over by VSCode, the number of users (and maybe contributors) appears to be going down.”

Read the official announcement by Facebook on Nuclide’s website.