Facebook has begun opening up source code for its Nuclide IDE, which is designed to offer a unified experience for Web and native mobile development.

Nuclide was designed for use by engineers at Facebook, but with the source code release, Facebook wants developers elsewhere to leverage the technology for themselves. It’s built as a series of packages on top of GitHub’s Atom “hackable” text editor, and platform support is still being developed for it.

Facebook chose the open source, customizable Atom text editor for a number of reasons. A desktop app based on Web technologies, Atom works with OS X 10, Windows 7 and 8 ,and Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux distributions. “It is built with contemporary Web technology that allows us to use our own React and ES7 expertise. It provides a powerful native shell for integrating well with local mobile compilers and build tools,” said Facebook Software Engineer Michael Bolin.

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