For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin). Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
Are there any plans to support AOT as well?
GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here...as a NixOS user, I really wish it used scheme instead of the nix language. However, I do like the pragmatic nature of NixOS (you're able to easily install non-free packages). GUIX doesn't make this easy at all from what I understand. I appreciate those virtues, but practically speaking, I have to use non-free software on the desktop all the time.
Guix does have the capacity to add 'channels', e.g. https://gitlab.com/mbakke/guix-chromium , so while non-free software while never be part of the distribution itself, it could be done unofficially. Also, you can run the Nix standalone on top of GuixSD, so you could run GuixSD and then use Nix to install whatever's missing.
> you could run GuixSD and then use Nix to install whatever's missing.
How much cooperation between the two is necessary? If I wanted to install CUDA drivers with Nix would it "just work" (i.e. if it works on NixOS it works on GuixSD) or could GuixSD make problems?
I found a comment from a year ago claiming that the kernel wouldn't load blobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14630581
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#33Man, I’ve really wanted to take the plunge and dedicate some play time to GUIX for a while now. I feel like between the GUIX package system and Shepherd, they’re creating an authentically new and exciting thing in the universe of Linux distributions. The fact that they’re using Scheme for so much of it is also pretty cool, as I think this sort of high level systems programming is a great potential use case for showca…
Having once spent a happy afternoon browsing the Guile info pages, but otherwise pretty unfamiliar with it, this seems to realize a lot of the promise that Guile has had from the beginning. Specifically, the idea that the language that ties together the GNU operating system is not C or bash, but Guile Scheme. A language that can do very low level stuff and GUI development and be used for scripting, empowering the users of a capital-F Free operating system that's hackable all the way down. That's my impression anyway. As I said, this is mostly gleaned from the Guile info pages, but I was impressed by the consistency of that vision with the GNU project's overall goals.
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#34For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin). Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
Are there any plans to support AOT as well?
Yeah. Well, guile already does AOT, but not to native code. Now it compiles to guile bytecode that is then jitted.
The plan is to use the JIT as a first step to do AOT compilation to native code and thus come a bit closer to the speed of chez. Hopefully quite a bit closer.
This is what I have gathered from Andy Wingo's mailing list posts, so grains of salt for everyone!
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#35Interesting,after all this criticism of systemd. This makes me wonder about the GuixSD distribution. Is this distro ready for prime-time. Suppose I switched from Linux Mint to GuixSD, what would be the advantages and disadvantages? I like Lisp and program in Racket, so Guile wouldn't be far from that. I just wonder about experiences of other. How much does switching to such a lesser known free distro as the main OS "…
I use nixos, not GuixSD, but I can speak to "what would be the advantages and disadvantages", particularly since guix is a reimplementation of nix. The benefits to me are immense, because I travel between around six machines on a daily or weekly basis. Prior to moving to NixOS, I'd have to manually keep those machines in sync in terms of software installs, etc. However, after switching to NixOS, I have a set of files…
For me, the problem isn't so much with the nix language(it's very similar to haskell), but the lack of discoverability for docs of library. The manual is mostly incomplete and i often have to look at sources.
My most favourite thing is that i can just override the packages to compile and install a new version/extra configure flags of a package that's not yet upstream.
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#36Does anyone know if they solved their "trust init script too much" problems?
Last time I checked, they were loading user-defined scripts right into PID 1, so a badly written script could bring down the whole system.
People blame systemd for pid 1 instability, but at least systemd crashes get fixed eventually. With Shepherd, any package on the system can cause PID 1 to crash, and this just seems to crazy for me.
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#37For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin). Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
How good is the concurrency support? a lot of schemes have poor support for it(basically roll your own via libev), except racket.
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#38For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin). Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
Scheme is a neat little language, but it's really not ideal for writing full software systems. Indeed, Guile & Racket (back when it was PLT Scheme) are perfect exemplars of Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. E.g. GOOPS is similar to CLOS, but missing a bit and unsupported other than…
I find many common lisp users' attitude towards scheme condescending. It is as if we are completely oblivious to the CL ecosystem or outright stupid to prefer something else.
I assure you, we look in envy at CL and what a standardised module system, portable networking and CFFI achieves. However, we still prefer scheme. Some of us actually like a single namespace, and don't mind the difference between false and nil (I have never really met a case where that distinction mattered much).
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a...non official repository of these somewhere?
There are a smattering of code snippets around This[1] is the one I used as a reference for my kernel build which includes brcmfmac There is also a feature called 'channels' (not widely documented AFAIK) which allows you to describe an outside repository of code you can reference to install packages. There is one[2] that provides Chromium (though I cannot get the build to succeed). The downside to all of these not be…
As someone who is sympathetic to their cause and their stance, I think the extreme position of excluding all non-free software can actually hamper the movement by making it less accessible to people. I get you always have to draw a line somewhere, but FSF draw it too firmly.
Re: GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 released
#40For anyone interested in guile, guile 3.0 will have a JIT, making it even faster than 2.2 (by quite a large margin). Guile is becoming really nice, and I find myself reaching for other lisps less and less.
How good is the concurrency support? a lot of schemes have poor support for it(basically roll your own via libev), except racket.
Pthreads and guile-fibers (a parallel concurrent ML implementation).
If you never used CML you should try it out.