guix VS live-bootstrap

> So what we are missing now is a 500GB framework that can write the config file for the programming language that is writing a config file for the actual program I wish to use.

That exists since 1960. It's called LISP. The e.g. https://guix.gnu.org/ uses with great success, the Guile Scheme dialect of LISP, to be precise. And FYI the "framework" is:

  $ ls --human-readable --size $(readlink $(which guile))

> inventing a brand new purely functional language programming language.

ISTM that if you dislike that, then there's GUIX.

https://guix.gnu.org/

Very briefly, AFAICT, it's "Nix but using Scheme".

And just wait till you discover Arch Linux, Gentoo, Guix, or NixOS.

https://guix.gnu.org for example. It did load before an update but it doesn't anymore.

Is it? Seems to me it's used for some pretty cool stuff, heard of Guix?

I think a "competitor" to Lua would be Guile [1], but I am not sure if it gets close to Lua in terms of lightweightness... it was designed to be used in the GNU project, with similar objects as Lua: to be light, easily embeddable. It's a Scheme (Lisp) so maybe not for everyone's taste... its "coolest" use i know of is for configuring Guix [2] (the GNU version of Nix).

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

[2] https://guix.gnu.org

No one said Guix yet, might be worth a look: https://guix.gnu.org/

GNU Guix! A fully functional package manager and distro heavily inspire by Nix. The primary difference between it and Nix being that it is almost entirely written and configured in GNU Guile, an implementation of Scheme (Lisp) and the official extension language of the GNU Project (originally intended to be for GNU what emacs lisp is for emacs).

You should perhaps utilize guix for your projects. It provides rather acceptable rust resp. crates support and in a perfectly reproducible build environment. But be aware, that it even tries to build even the rust compiler from source by going through all this nasty steps of its iterative bootstrap process. This can be a little bit complex and time-consuming, if you need an up-to-date version of rustc.

Not using this, but tangentially related is (full disclosure, i am a maintainer of this project) live-bootstrap, which uses about a KB of binary to do a full "Linux from scratch" style thing - read https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... for all 143 steps you have to go through to get there.

Actually you can skip a file system entirely if you do something like stage0 or live-bootstrap https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

See https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap, and https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst has all the steps we take.

live-bootstrap builds a variety of intermediate systems, starting from a <1KB binary seed (kernel excluded). Check parts.rst for a description, it's kinda wild just how many C and C subset compilers get compiled... but the end result is a system with musl and GCC 4.7, from which building the latest GCC is 2 steps away.

There is also live-bootstrap which uses a similar bootstrap chain to Guix (stage0 -> Mes -> tcc -> gcc), but without needing Guile/guix-daemon binaries etc. The whole thing starts with just a 357-byte binary seed (source)!

There's some cool stuff being done in this area. For example, live-bootstrap goes from a tiny, auditable binary seed to a full GNU userland using only source code (and a Linux kernel).