About.
How Nu started, what it is, where it goes.
How Nu started.
Two years of refactoring before the shape settled.
Nu started in fall 2024 as a handful of primitives I kept pulling out of a real system I was building. State handling did not fit any of the alternatives at the shape of data I was moving, so I isolated my own. Then execution — a small in-process engine for composing functions into flows. Small pieces, growing.
January 2025 I split those pieces out into their own repo. That is the moment Nu officially began. What followed was over 1.5 years of refactoring on a daily basis (hundreds of interface shapes, several rewrites from scratch) while a live system ran on top of it and pushed back on every wrong turn.
Somewhere in that stretch I stopped calling it a library and started calling it a primitive. Nu 0.1 is what came out.
Why Nu.
Software today is a stack of layers glued together. Nu says the glue should be the primitive, not the plumbing.
Every real program touches many worlds: a database, a UI, a network, a compute cluster, an LLM. Today each of those speaks its own language, so most of the code you write is translation between them. Serialization, retries, protocol matching, type mapping. The work the program is actually for gets buried underneath.
Nu collapses the picture. Every resource gets a Ref (a name for what you touch). Every operation is an Interaction (a description of what to do with it). Fabrics execute. Same vocabulary whether the Ref points to memory, a KV row, a browser widget, a remote object, or a worker on a cluster. The picture flips from a stack to a hub: one program at the center, many worlds around it, no glue between them.
That is the bet. If interaction is the primitive, the translation work falls away and biz logic gets its own layer back.
Where this is going.
A real system runs on it. The next stretch is opening the door for other people to run their systems on it too.
Nu 0.1 is what shipped. Five fabrics (memory, KV, UI, network, cluster), one install, examples that boot. Underneath, a live production system already runs on it (a terabyte a day, thirty distributed workers, ten sharded databases). That system is the ground truth I build against.
What is stable: the interaction model, the Ref and Interaction vocabulary, the fabric shape. What will keep moving: fabric coverage, ergonomics, the apps built on top.
Try Nu.
One command gets you the wheel with every fabric. Then follow the movies tutorial to build a real app in an afternoon.
01 Install
pip install "nustack-py[all]"02 Run the demo
nu demo movies03 Build your app
Browse examplesLike what you see?
The project is young. Star it, join the room, watch what we ship next.