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What Is Nix?

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Re: What Is Nix?

#141

Post by cldellow »

nilkn wrote: post #129

This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end o…

The PhD thesis that goes with Nix is a really great intro to it. It's very accessible and well-structured.

It motivates the need for a new take on package management by analogy to memory management in programming languages.

It contrasts how software deployment works today (“Fuck it, I’m sure /usr/bin/local/python is a reference to a python 2.7.12 install with PIL available”) to how we used to write software (“Fuck it, I’m sure 0x7FEA6072 is the address of the array of files; so clearly, assuming a 32-bit address space, the seventh file is at 0x7FEA608A.”)

In both cases, as long as your assumption was correct, things go swimmingly. But it could be easier and rely less on hoping your assumptions are correct, and more on things that are verifiably true. And that's what Nix offers: a way to build software that is insulated against assumptions and "it works on my machine".

Thesis: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf

Re: What Is Nix?

#142

Post by dangoljames »

Really it's kind of a minimalist linux distro with the capacity to coexist harmonically and/or parasitically with another operating system. Don't try to say 'oh it's like arch' or 'yeah it's a bit like Ubuntu', because no, it isn't, and by design. It seems that as much as design meant to go a particular way, there it went.

It does pretty well directly on the hardware, but seems to want to live (like it is) in a container, though that might just be it's style ;) it certainly seems to be convenient for containers.

It has a certain otaku appeal and ninjatsu stealth. I'll probably like it a lot some day soon but at the moment it just screams 'exotic' in my ears while I'm asleep at night.

This probably isn't helping so I'll just stop now.

Re: What Is Nix?

#143

Post by Gaelan »

dataflow wrote: post #2

I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?

Nix is a package manager, and nixpkgs is its "official package respositry." Both of those pieces should work on any (decently popular) POSIX system.

NixOS is a Linux distribution that uses Nix in place of apt or yum or what-have-you, and uses nix to allow the entire system to be configured declaatively.

Re: What Is Nix?

#144

Post by jchw »

dangoljames wrote: post #142

Really it's kind of a minimalist linux distro with the capacity to coexist harmonically and/or parasitically with another operating system. Don't try to say 'oh it's like arch' or 'yeah it's a bit like Ubuntu', because no, it isn't, and by design. It seems that as much as design meant to go a particular way, there it went. It does pretty well directly on the hardware, but seems to want to live (like it is) in a conta…

> It has a certain otaku appeal and ninjatsu stealth. I'll probably like it a lot some day soon but at the moment it just screams 'exotic' in my ears while I'm asleep at night.

I’m trying to refute this characterization, but I am sitting in front of my desktop with an anime background in SwayWM on NixOS. Is there something I don’t know about correlations between seemingly unrelated hobbies?

Re: What Is Nix?

#145

Post by Gaelan »

squid_demon wrote: post #110

"All software exists in a graph of dependencies." And some of these graphs consist of a single node. Junk the jank!

I mean, if you count the compiler/interpreter (which nix does), realistically that's a bare minimum of two.

Re: What Is Nix?

#146

Post by joepie91_ »

geofft wrote: post #133
addicted wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hours long build system appears to be attributed to Nix. Is Nix really that slow?

If you're applying idiomatic Nix to modern JS, I wouldn't be surprised - modern JS tends to involve installing thousands of packages by just combining them into a directory, but Nix doesn't want you to edit existing directories. So your dependency graph turns into a build-dependency graph, with each JS package requiring a full build of everything it depends on, and the Nix build system is presumably not optimized for…

Hi, JS developer here who uses Nix and who liberally makes use of single-responsibility modules.

No, Nix does not need "hours" to build a modern JS project. Something else is going on here. Nix is slow, but not that slow.

(With the limited information provided here, my first guess would be "someone turned off the binary cache because they don't trust prebuilt binaries, and now it recompiles the world from scratch because there are no prebuilt binaries anymore".)

Re: What Is Nix?

#147

Post by jdlshore »

takeda wrote: post #111
austinl wrote: post #102

We're using Nix where I work as well, and while I can say it was not the most user-friendly to set up, once we got it in place it has reliably worked for the last two years. We used to have a long and flaky shell script which set up the development environment for new engineers and CI machines (for iOS development on macOS, specifically). Now we have a very simple script which just installs nix and runs alls builds t…

You can use Nix on MacOS X and with nix you don't need brew. I used it for few years that way. If you use nix-darwin + home-manager you can also configure your mac the way you would NixOS. Amazing tools that discovered not long ago (they aren't specific to os x) is: niv - makes pinning to specific repos/versions in repos much easier which helps with reproducibility, especially pinning of nixpkgs version which is now…

Unfortunately, the security updates introduced in MacOS Catalina have made installing Nix on the latest version of MacOS a fairly involved process.[1] I looked at using it when I rebuilt my computer recently and decided to wait until it was more baked.

[1] Catalina restricts which directories can be added to the root dir. Nix uses /nix.

Re: What Is Nix?

#148

Post by somatic »

geofft wrote: post #133
addicted wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hours long build system appears to be attributed to Nix. Is Nix really that slow?

If you're applying idiomatic Nix to modern JS, I wouldn't be surprised - modern JS tends to involve installing thousands of packages by just combining them into a directory, but Nix doesn't want you to edit existing directories. So your dependency graph turns into a build-dependency graph, with each JS package requiring a full build of everything it depends on, and the Nix build system is presumably not optimized for…

The term “modern JS” should be used only as a pejorative.

Re: What Is Nix?

#149

Post by tomberek »

takeda wrote: post #111
austinl wrote: post #102

We're using Nix where I work as well, and while I can say it was not the most user-friendly to set up, once we got it in place it has reliably worked for the last two years. We used to have a long and flaky shell script which set up the development environment for new engineers and CI machines (for iOS development on macOS, specifically). Now we have a very simple script which just installs nix and runs alls builds t…

You can use Nix on MacOS X and with nix you don't need brew. I used it for few years that way. If you use nix-darwin + home-manager you can also configure your mac the way you would NixOS. Amazing tools that discovered not long ago (they aren't specific to os x) is: niv - makes pinning to specific repos/versions in repos much easier which helps with reproducibility, especially pinning of nixpkgs version which is now…

I've had luck with using the approach in here https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Python#Emulating_virtualenv_with_nix... because it allows the escape hatch of using pip if something isn't packaged and I want to quickly try something out. I have also been meaning to try mach-nix which may obviate the need for pip at all. Having a good standard skeleton for a python/nix project would be super helpful to add to the wiki, etc.

Re: What Is Nix?

#150

Post by ironmagma »

nilkn wrote: post #129

This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end o…

Isn’t that the same goal as Docker? I’m surprised there’s still no Docker base image for NixOS...
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