Dev Diary (June 2017)

Corey Montella - 06 Jul 2017

Preview 5 of v0.3

We released a new preview of v0.3 that includes several bug fixes and some new features. For a full changelog, please see the release notes. Two of the new features, the console and file libraries, provide new options for using Eve.

We’ve supported running Eve in headless mode (without hooks to the browser) for awhile now, but it wasn’t useful since most of our UI, debugging, and IO at the moment are done through the browser. The console library allows you to write to stdout and stderr, so you can now pipe values generated by Eve to other applications (we still need to add the ability to pipe values into Eve, but that’s on our list).

Speaking of getting data into Eve, the file library allows you write and read files directly from the filesystem, opening up the ability to read larger datasets into Eve. We’ll be adding facilities shortly in Eve that parse common data formats into records, like JSON and CSV.

Progress with v0.4

Many of you have asked about the status of v0.4, and we’re pleased to say it’s coming along nicely. For those who don’t know, the v0.4 runtime is implemented in Rust, mainly for increased performance. It’s similar conceptually to the v0.3 runtime (based on the research of Frank McSherry in differential dataflow), but is designed with the lessons learned from v0.3. We’ll share more about performance when the runtime is feature-complete and ready for wider distribution.

Community

Community Slack

We opened a community slack channel, so you can chat with and get help from us and fellow Eve developers. There’s usually at least one dev hanging around the channel during working hours (Pacific time), but in the future we’re planning explicit office hours where our sole purpose is to help you solve problems with your code. For now we’re keeping it casual, so drop by and we can talk about Eve.

Tweve

Brian Theado has been working on Tweve, which marries Eve and Tiddlywiki. Tiddlywiki is a notebook-like environment that allows you to embed rich-content in your notes. Tweve is a plugin for Tiddlywiki that allows you to embed Eve code in your notebook. One of the more interesting parts of this project is that it allows you to embed multiple Eve programs in a single document, as well as multiple documents as a single program. We’re very interested to see how far Brian takes his project!

Eve Around the World

Copenhagen, June 27

Zubair Quraishi held yet another successful meetup in Copenhagen, and we’re definitely grateful for his continued evangelism across the pond! He’s posted some pictures and reactions on the Meetup website and the mailing list. Thanks again Zubair!

San Francisco, June 27

Thanks to everyone who came to our second meetup, in which we helped people install Eve and introduced the language to people who were new. We learned a lot by watching people go through the quickstart tutorial, which has caused us to re-evaluate the getting started process.

San Francisco, Tuesday July 25

We’re having another meetup on July 25, at 7:00 PM at the Eve offices in downtown San Francisco (SOMA). Please RSVP so we know how many pizzas to order :)