# Nushell core team meeting 2023-03-01

## Attendees

- Reilly
- JT
- Michael
- Jakub

## Agenda

- (If Darren wants to talk about it) Quoting rules https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8183
- Should we make ranges open-closed like other languages? https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/8162#issuecomment-1445540872
- We don't seem to have strong opinions on this in the core team
- Let's hold a public vote on this later
- Cratification update
- I believe we have an issue with the nu! macro... It is currently loading default_env.nu and default_config.nu which means trying to test crates like nu-cmd-lang, etc that do not have the commands that are referenced in these two config files causes a stack overflow.
- Potential Solution : All of the tests in nushell run fine when default_env.nu and default_config.nu have zero bytes except for the plugin tests and one test info_config.rs.
- The default nu! macro would not load the config files and I would add a 2nd nu-config! macro that did load them.
-
- [nu-cmd-lib](https://github.com/stormasm/nu_cmd_lang76/tree/nucmdlib/crates/nu-cmd-lib/src) is a thin wrapper crate around nu-cmd-lang that provides running externals, a table viewer, and the env directory
- it also provides a location for the tests to live from nu-cmd-lang. they can't live in nu-cmd-lang because there is no external command support in nu-cmd-lang
- the external commands support have Table as a dependency so it has to be there as well.
- What to do about displaying empty list+records?
- https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8014#issuecomment-1444019319
- Problem: the `each` in `... | each { |i| print $i }` returns an empty list, which now gets displayed
- Should we change how `each` behaves? Or how it's rendered? Or revert the change?
- Can't just output null from each b/c it's streaming
- Could render differently in script
- Can people just use `for`?
- JT recent experiments
- playing with a VM for Nushell
- Can we do type inference well enough? Seems like it!
- Orders of magnitude faster than Nushell is today
- Trying out Cranelift; speeds equivalent to V8
- Thought experiment: thinking about what plugins need
- plugin takes in 2 callbacks/function pointers:
- `next(stream_id)` to get the next item out of a stream
- `run(block_id, params) -> stream_id`
- plugin gets input as parameters, maybe a parameter is a block that will be running
- for example: could do `each` as a plugin
- hold some state on the Nushell side
- PRs:
- stdlib from antoine: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8150
- pure ASCII prompt: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8080
- reedline content in `$nu` https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8207
- vs `commandline` command
- Unit tests for HTTP commands: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/8267
- Are we OK with the Tokio dependency?
- Aliases
- One issue: broken virtualenv, requires alias to parser keyword (might be possible to solve by using parsed call instead of raw spans in `parse_<keyword>()` functions)
- Parse-time constants, suggestion
- Move most of `$nu` to be a parse-time constant
- Other stuff can be moved there as well, such as NU_LIB_DIRS, or even PWD (both somewhat are already because of `merge_env()`)
- Problem with that: (see below)
- Rename `$nu.scope` to `$scope` and keep it a run-time variable (Reilly's lazy record)

# Discussed Topics

### Problem with parse-time eval

const test_path = ([$nu.pwd tests tests.nu] | path join)
const if ($test_path | path exists) {
    use $test_path
} 

Works OK if we have a full parse-eval cycle. Breaks if we parse once, store AST, then run eval separately.

## PR's