Install nickle with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, pacman

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• nickle

Project history

Nickle was presented at the 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in the Freenix track. The USENIX abstract describes it as a vaguely C-like language for numerical applications, useful as both a desk calculator and as a prototyping and implementation language, and notes that its history is an example of an idea becoming freely available software.

The upstream release directory shows public release artifacts from April 2001, including 1.99.x tarballs and RPMs, followed by the 2.00 tarball on October 27, 2001. The same release directory continues through 2.108, dated March 14, 2026, which Homebrew packaged as stable 2.108.

Adoption history

Nickle has long-lived Unix packaging rather than broad hype-driven adoption. The av.db input lists Homebrew, MacPorts, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and Alpine packaging. Homebrew analytics on July 1, 2026 reported 103 install-on-request events over 365 days, so Homebrew usage is small but the package persists across distributions.

Its cultural niche is the classic Unix power-user calculator: richer than `bc`, scriptable, arbitrary precision, C-like enough for programmers, and maintained by well-known X/Open Source developers rather than a large application vendor.

How it is used

Users run `nickle` interactively for arbitrary-precision calculations, load files, define functions, inspect top-level history, and write small numerical programs. The tutorial walks from command invocation into datatypes, declarations, control flow, functions, namespaces, exceptions, continuations, threads, and mutual exclusion.

For package nerds, Nickle is interesting because it is a compact, old-school language runtime whose packaging footprint is tiny but unusually durable. It is the kind of tool people install when `bc` is too limited and a full Python/R/Julia stack is unnecessary.

Timeline

• {'date': '2001-04-09', 'event': 'Upstream release directory shows Nickle 1.99.x tarballs and RPMs.'}
• {'date': '2001-06', 'event': 'Nickle paper published at USENIX ATC 2001.'}
• {'date': '2001-10-27', 'event': 'Nickle 2.00 tarball published.'}
• {'date': '2026-03-14', 'event': 'Nickle 2.108 release artifacts published.'}

Related projects

• bc
• dc
• GNU bc
• calc

Sources

• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/nickle.json
• https://keithp.com/cgit/nickle.git
• https://nickle.org/release/
• https://nickle.org/tutorial/
• https://www.usenix.org/conference/2001-usenix-annual-technical-conference/nickle-language-principles-and-pragmatics