adcomp VS nix

Are any of your R users TMB users? Because I ran into that in multiple setups (Guix SD and Guix on foreign distros) where only a specific ordering worked even when using guix shell --pure. This was back in the R 4.1.2 days. In theory it should be impossible and yet I ran into it. No I was not mixing packages installed via. install.packages.

Right now with the latest version of Guix and R 4.2.1 TMB is not usable. Try running:

"guix shell --container r r-tmb make gcc-toolchain gfortran-toolchain"

then try running the linreg.R (with the corresponding cpp file, or any of the examples) example from https://github.com/kaskr/adcomp/tree/master/tmb_examples

There is no free lunch:).

I remember spending a summer using Template Model Builder (TMB), which is a useful R/C++ automatic differentiation (AD) framework, for working with accelerated failure time models. For these models, the survival to time T given covariates X is defined by S(t|X) = P(T>t|X) = S_0(t exp(-beta^T X)) for baseline survival S_0(t). I wanted to use splines for the baseline survival and then use AD for gradients and random effects. Unfortunately, after implementing the splines in template C++, I found a web page entitled "Things you should NOT do in TMB" (https://github.com/kaskr/adcomp/wiki/Things-you-should-NOT-d...) - which included using if statements that are based on coefficients. In this case, the splines for S_0 depend on beta, which is this specific excluded case:(. An older framework (ADMB) did not have this constraint, but dissemination of code was more difficult. Finally, PyTorch did not have an implementation of B-splines or an implementation for Laplace's approximation. Returning to my opening comment, there is no free lunch.

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity