Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

Important question is if its fixable.

Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents. Nix's runtime is not magic. Guile should be able to expose a language and evaluate it in a similar way.

For my part, I've not opted into Guix because it's a GNU project, and I've decided to avoid anything in the FSF sphere of influence. Their orthodoxy turns off contributors and they have a history of taking insular hard-liner approaches that are utopian. Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust (which has a community that is not a fan of the GPL), what has had FSF backing and been successful? Linus starts two of the most influential pieces of software in human civilization and RMS wants to name the awards. The pragmatic culture that shifted away from the FSF has I think largely adopted Nix, and it shows. Nix is open for business, available on lots of platforms, has commercial entities built around its success.

Agreed on the assessment, but for me, part of the appeal of Guix is a way to turn that ship around.

isn't there nonguix? you know, the Ashley Madison of guix?

> what has had FSF backing and been successful?

GCC is still indispensable. I doubt it will be rewritten in Rust any time soon.

For what it's worth the association with GNU is basically historical at this point. RMS has never accepted the original vision of the project (to be the official GNU OS) and the project outgrew GNU's dilapidated infrastructure a long time ago, which the project is finally addressing with the migration to Codeberg. The FSF gave the project a place for people to donate specifically to Guix but have never really embraced it, otherwise. That has been superseded by a dedicated European nonprofit for Guix. The most recent Guix Days gathering before FOSDEM featured a lengthy conversation of breaking ties with GNU entirely but no decision has been made on that, yet.

GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.

> Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents.

While that may be true, it is particularly the case for nixpkgs; i.e., you may imagine a contender to nixpkgs that is less tangled.

I’ve recently enjoyed reading on research into simpler alternatives; GrizzlT’s deep-dive into nixpkgs design patterns, and nrdxp’s atom format:

https://grizzlt.prose.sh/corelib-revolutionary-nixpkgs

https://nrd.sh/blog/atom-anatomy/

> Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust

Highly doubtful to happen anytime soon.

Off the top of my head: GCC, Emacs, coreutils, sed, grep, find, parallel, Guile, Coreboot, GNOME, GIMP, GnuPG, Bash

In each case, development is the work of the developers, and they themselves deserve most credit. But the FSF and the GNU project have certainly been involved with lots of software that is important, widely used, and works well.

GNU software is still responsible for huge and often critical chunks of the stack in most Linux distros.

Already happening my friend. uutils. It is MIT licensed. Funnily, I recall someone had a story at MIT about not liking passwords. I'm sure they were right?

Check out the spice: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/im-shocked-the-rust-community-...

I tried just a few months ago. Two shell scripts I use failed due to something wonky with sort.

Everything else worked well enough for my use case.

It may be happening in your bubble, yes, but not outside of that. They are not 1:1 replacements at all, with probably logic bugs introduced (see their Issues page) as well (call them regressions). I would not hold my breath if I were you.

Not necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.

"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.