Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is Nix and why you should try it

yakking.branchable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 201 posts

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#151

Post by terminalcommand »

nerdponx wrote: post #119
tonyg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some Smalltalks (Squeak and Pharo) have a wonderful tool called a "Method Finder". The way it works is you write a sequence of arguments and an expected result , and it suggests a method to call. For example, I just now tried it, entering 3. 4. 7 in the input. It suggested the following methods: 3 + 4 --> 7 3 bitOr: 4 --> 7 3 bitXor: 4 --> 7 Clicking on any of these opens a browser on the class and method concerned.…

That's pretty cool. Is the technique for this documented somewhere, or do I have to read the Squeak or Pharo source?

I've looked into it a bit. Visualworks smalltalk documentation gave me an idea[1].

In Smalltalk everything is an object, that is including numbers, characters etc. The standar method-lookup searches from the innermost class methods to the outermost class methods.

The method finder could simply iteratively go through all applicable methods that return the class requested and match results.

[1]: http://esug.org/data/Old/vw-tutorials/vw25/vw25ug.pdf (page 42 method-lookup)

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#152

Post by rekado »

joepie91_ wrote: post #80
majewsky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the grandparent, but from what i can see, grandparent compares Nix with traditional package managers like dpkg or RPM, rather than Guix. I cannot answer your question, but I think Nix has (for some reason) a lot more publicity than Guix at the moment.

Guix is derived from Nix, so that might be why.

If by "derived" you mean that it is another implementation of functional package management, then you are right.

But if "derived" implies that Guix is a fork, then you are mistaken.

Guix is not a fork of Nix.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#153

Post by johnramsden »

clhodapp wrote: post #148
johnramsden wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's coming: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/9250

That's a bit too strong a statement to make based on a two-year-old still-open PR with an uncertain future. It seems like it might be coming at some point in the future .

No, there's actually a fair bit of activity around it, if you read through the comments in the pull request it has a fair bit of activity.

They recently got a fair bit of interest on the mailing list https://goo.gl/kvNwC1 and raised some money for it as well https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/9250#issuecomment-3208....

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it's planned to go in the next release.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#154

Post by mbrock »

ris wrote: post #45
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #33

My experience with Nix was a real pleasure, and a complete failure. I set out with the goal of building a development environment for a software I was working on. I thought - Nix sounds like a better Docker, where it's possible to choose package versions independently of the rest of the system. It's perfect for testing! I found the package description language refreshing - it was powerful without getting too complica…

Although other people have different opinions to me, I don't really see Nix as something for the desktop, but for development, deployment and server software it's a killer solution for me.

Extremely happy user of NixOS on my laptop (Dell XPS) for 2.5 years chiming in to say that being able to share parameterized configuration modules between your laptop and your servers is ridiculously nice for a developer and admin!

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#155

Post by tejasmanohar »

wmertens wrote: post #142
kccqzy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should mention that on High Sierra there’s a bug with kill(-1, ...) that sometimes causes Nix builds to lock up the whole system.

Also, the OS X windowmanager has a memory leak and you have to resart every so often. Yesterday mine was 22GB and after restart <100MB… Nothing to do with Nix, just venting ;-)

  you have to restart every so often
I've never had that happen. Maybe things that don't have to do with Nix... really just don't have to do with Nix ;-)

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#156

Post by xwvvvvwx »

rekado wrote: post #152
joepie91_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guix is derived from Nix, so that might be why.

If by "derived" you mean that it is another implementation of functional package management, then you are right. But if "derived" implies that Guix is a fork, then you are mistaken. Guix is not a fork of Nix.

Guix is built on top of the nix daemon, so while it's not strictly a fork, derived seems fair.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#157

Post by [deleted] »

dikaiosune wrote: post #128
roblabla wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some rando's This is a GNU-approved fork > weakly motivated Has lots of strong motivation, like a stricter stance on non-free software, the usage of a "real", more expressive language (Guile) instead of a niche, poorly undocumented DSL (Nix), use of GNU Shepherd instead of SystemD for the init system, among other > niche NIH rehash It shares most of the codebase with Nix, so to say it's NIH is missing the point. Ni…

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Guix, is in fact, Nix/Guile, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Nix plus Guile.

[deleted]

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#158

Post by arianvanp »

jancsika wrote: post #138
joepie91_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, OpenGL is a bit of a weird case. Hardware is the one thing that actually varies between systems no matter how declarative your configuration is - this is normally not a problem, since the kernel abstracts it away. The problem with OpenGL, then, is that every graphics driver provides its own set of OpenGL libraries that is subtly different from all the others. This means that applications need to be built against…

Does the Guix choice of a more expressive language for defining the packages help here?

No. I think both languages are equally expressive in the end (though one will be a bit uglier than the other). But the problem is probably less big in Guix because only a few graphics drivers are actually supported due to the fact that all the drivers needs to be Free and free of binary blobs.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#159

Post by jlebrech »

k__ wrote: post #29
ldlework wrote: post #15

I have recently started looking into Nix to solve the problem of dotfile deployment to new OSX workstations. When you get a new laptop, you clone your dotfiles, maybe symlink them to your home directory -- and then what? Nix solves this problem for me by coupling my dotfile deployment with the installation of the related software. The learning curve has been absolutely tremendous, however. That said, the support on F…

Nice. I started using macOS 5 months ago and it felt a bit as a step back coming from Linux. Does Nix work good with macOS?

get brew, iterm2, and zsh.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#160

Post by nextos »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #112
vog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive question: Isn't all that also true for Guix? If so, why do your prefer Nix over Guix?

Guix explicitly rejects non-free software. Unfortunately, that isn't workable for most of us.

Note you can use any Nix package in Guix...
Post reply on HN