Nushell core team meeting 2024-08-07

Attendees

• Devyn
• Andy
• Michael
• Stefan
• Darren
• Jack
• Antoine
• Rose

Agenda

• Material for demo
• Whether to or not to merge polars sink and polars to- into one polars save command
• Do we want to ship the assignment change in one release? (backtick string behavior, impact on existing scripts)

Discussed Topics

Stefan's demo

• Send him some quick oneliners that are really impressive for a demo
• Ask Sophia?
• Look at Reilly's demo
• The wayback machine 1st reedline video

Polars

• polars sink is a new command that uses the streaming stuff to stream directly to disk from a lazyframe
• actually maybe we want polars save instead? unify the polars to- whatever with sink?
  • automatically handle lazyframes
  • don't need to stay true to the polars API
• options for different data formats?
  • key/value or use actual nushell options?
  • the actual nushell options are self-documenting so that's nice
• doing stuff more lazily when possible
• Would like to have more nushell-like apis for some things

Plugins as modules

• Would be nice to be able to rename plugins entirely e.g. plugin use polars as pl
• having them be modules would work
• Modules currently interact weirdly with the help system, gwenya has done some work on this but there's probably more to be done

assignment with backticks

• This could be a major gotcha

• ​​$foo = `bar`
  

  now behaving quite differently
• We might not want backticks to work this way
• Maybe force people to use the carets to run an external command with spaces special character
• how relevant is the backtick string
  • acts like a bare word
  • execute in command position otherwise acts like a string
  • Does not apply \ escaping (so escape hatch for windows paths vs. "" strings)
  • could this be just a regular string type without escaping '' and for execution you require ^ (our internal command handle the spaces for subcommands anyways so no need for quoting there.)
  • have completion add the ^ when necessary, in command position
  • globs: this works right now:

    ​​​​​​ls `*.txt`
    

• maybe backtick quotes doing (glob) expansion (while permitting whitespace) is still good

effect of the assignment change

$env.EDITOR = vim

would now execute instead of assign (:wq)

Unlikely to be totally destructive but annoying to mitigate if in configs or scripts

If we want to do a warning phase it would only catch the most actively updating users.

Solution: just require a caret for external in assignment RHS for a few releases, so the impact is mitigated and at some point we can sunset the caret requirement.