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Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

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11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

#13
post #2

All clouds / serverless will end up like this. It's a matter of "when", not "if"

Agreed. Not gonna lie, I am upset and angry to see small companies disappear and be eaten up by larger ones. But I praise them for not building in any vendor lock-in. And I also appreciate them for open-sourcing their toolchain

Re: Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

#14

For the lazy: bought by Shopify, apparently

Back to Nix again? I remember one of their employees had a great video series on it, but then they stopped using it because it was too complicated.

Yeah, they gave a talk about it at NixCon last year:

https://talks.nixcon.org/nixcon-2025/talk/UPHTPD/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzjKCIqUVk

I don't remember all of the details, so if you're curious you should watch the talk. :)

But IIRC the main points that differentiated this new effort from the old one were that (1) there was buy-in from the very top of the company, (2) they took a more incremental approach where the old one was more all-or-nothing, and (3) they tackled the edge cases and hardest repos first.

The talk includes some info about the failings of their first effort as well. It's worth a watch.

Re: Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good for the team, bad for the community.

but the community still gets the source code, kudos to the Garnix team!

Good point. Really graceful way to transition, and it definitely offsets the loss. Maybe in some ways it'll end up being a net gain, who knows?

Re: Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

#19
post #16

Was this named by a German? "Gar nichts", pronounced as "Gar Nix", means "absolutely nothing".

At least for Nix itself, that's pretty much it except via Dutch.

> The name Nix is derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing; build actions do not see anything that has not been explicitly declared as an input

From page 81 of the original paper: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

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