nix VS nix

If we drop std Rust ceases to be economical due to the time it would take to reimplement the data structures and IO interfaces it provides, not to mention the event loop crate we use (calloop). At that point we'd be relying on so much FFI via eg. nix that the relative safety would be diminished too. After reimplementing all that it's not clear to me that we'd even save that much size, but I suppose it's possible.

Now that we have covered the fundamentals of signals, let's delve into the world of handling signals in Rust! Unlike C, where signal handling is built into the language modules, Rust provides several libraries that enable developers to handle signals with ease. Libraries such as signal_hook, nix, libc, and tokio handle signals that primarily use C bindings to make it possible to work with signals.

Obviously you meant the nix crate

Finally, there's the nix crate, which provides a safe Rust API over the libc functions.

You can take a look here for example: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Unsafe code can in principle speed up I/O by calling libc for special syscalls, but uutils typically uses safe wrappers from nix instead. Very rarely there's a line of unsafe code needed to sand off the edges.

This post fails to speak to me on two fronts:

* The `nix` crate is a cornerstone of the Rust development ecosystem: if you do anything that requires POSIX or various nix-specific APIs beyond those wrapped by the standard library, then `nix` most likely provides a high-level and safe* wrapper for them. Perfectionism is a virtue in this context, one that keeps large parts of the Rust ecosystem from accidentally consuming buggy code. The author unfortunately chose a particularly messy and bug-prone corner of the POSIX APIs to wrap, and ran into a correspondingly intensive review process. I've merged simpler wrappers[1][2] with no fuss.

* Alacritty seems to work just fine. I switched to it about two months ago, after using nothing but (heavily customized) rxvt-unicode for a decade. Maybe it's because I don't use ligatures or images in my terminals (I thought we were talking about non-"toy" functionality!), but I haven't found myself wanting for anything beyond what Alacritty already does. And the scrollback seems to work nicely. To summarize: where's the tragedy?

[1]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1342

[2]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1331

One thing I'd like to see is a MSRV policy, as its causing problems for downstreams (https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/issues/1555)

> 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