# Nushell core team meeting 2022-06-01

## Attendees

- Jakub
- Michael
- Fernando
- Andres
- Reilly
- sholderbach (note-taking)
- jt

## Open Topics

- Hook and overlays getting everything to work
- Dataframe overlay

## Discussed topics

### Arrow and dataframes
- Arrow provides efficient operations and memory representation
- core arrow: memory format spec
- Where to get our query planning from?
- arrow rust is currently fragmented into two implementations.
- polars with `arrow2`
- other projects use `arrow`
- Ideas
- Everything in memory vs chunked.
- Backing storage if likely going out of memory (e.g. parquet files)
- Good examples of using Arrow and Dataframes
- [Iox](https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb_iox)
- [Ballista](https://github.com/apache/arrow-ballista)
### Detour: Asynchronous execution model
- Q: Is it a fit for nushell after engine-q?
- JT reports from/about tokio
- Obvious: UI interactiveness
- But: traditional shell use not many tasks like a webserver
- Shell has some significant (file) I/O
- For direct use in the nu language we would need language components (select the first succeeding, collect unordered, collect in sequence)

### Thought to sleep on: Who is the client of nushell?
- Jakt's design was so fast due to the explicit rails of the SerenityOS project. Nushell is more than one thing but what do we want to address
- Nushell as a toolbox (current developments: overlays, "overloading")

### Nu is more than just shell
- Do we want to drop `shell` from `nushell` in official communication as we can more than just traditional shell work with the language?
- Reaching out to get github `.nu` support
- Resolving the name/syntax highlighting conflict with the current but abandoned `nu`

### Permeable/Transparent/Environment touching blocks
- Idea JT: split closure / block
- Special sigil for immediate evalution on the block to create environment effects.
- would not be available for functions

- Corner case: overlays already provide defs etc. and are special scopes
- maybe requires two modes: basic environment affecting and overlay definition affecting

- Kubouch: define at the callsite (like rust unsafe block?)
- but do we really want those annotations to become viral (annotation on every function that might be affected by use of `@env`)?

 def-env foo [x: int] {
    let-env FOO = $x + 10
}

foo 10 

# Very common use case users expect
@env @overlay if 4 > 2 { 
    overlay add spam
} else {
	overlay add eggs
}

 def foo [x: Closure] {
     @overlay do $x 
     
     # ???? who knows what happened
 }