rnix-lsp VS nickel

There's a work in progress language server: rnix which I'm using in emacs. Features like autocomplete are limited though, I'm guessing because you'd need to evaluate the actual Nix code to correctly deduce what properties exist.

There’s rnix-lsp.

https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-lsp works ok, it has some autocomplete but it does not infer options most packages expose unfortunately.

Looks cool! Any thoughts on the relationship between Statix and https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-lsp ?

I find the nix language to be quite pleasant. There are some syntax quirks and types would be nice, but in general the “json with functions” vibe is imo great and a very nice fit for the domain. Lots of other modern config languages (e.g. dhall, jsonnet) have ended up in this part of the design space too.

With that said tweag has been working on a kind of nix 2.0 / nix with types for a while with the aim (I think) of being able to use it in nixpkgs: https://github.com/tweag/nickel

There’s an issue for this :)

https://github.com/tweag/nickel/issues/357

I think the answer is yes and no. As a language (and as far as tooling is involved), I think Nickel is entirely suitable to fill the same role as the Nix language (maybe at the same scale as Nixpkgs the performance will need some work, but that's it).

Unfortunately, being a Nix replacement involves much more than just being a good language for configuration. It requires to interact tightly with all the existing Nix code that has been produced (basically, Nixpkgs). This is the hard part, which isn't there yet. Some design document that was started a long time ago can give you more details: https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/693.

The best current take is organist (https://github.com/nickel-lang/organist), which is much more limited in scope (basically development shell), but has some form of interaction with Nix and Nixpkgs, albeit limited. I think the recent development around json-schema-to-nickel and the availability of JSON schemas for NixOS modules (as mentioned at the end of the post) might make it realistic to write boring NixOS configs in Nickel (and have the nice in-LSP validation), but we haven't had the time to try this combination yet.

So, its key features are:

1. domain-specific: designed for conveniently creating and composing derivations. This reason alone already justifies a new language, or an embedded domain-specific language (such as the Guile/Scheme for guix), or a mix of both (Starlark, the build language of Bazel embedded in a restricted Python-variant).

2. purely functional: this ties well into the philosophical backing of Nix the package manager, which aims to be purely functional, also known as hermeticity in other build systems (Bazel).

3. lazily evaluated: similar to other build systems (including Bazel), so that you can build only what you need on demand.

4. dynamically typed: this one is controversial. Being dynamically typed—in other words, not developing a type system—gets Nix out of the door first. But users often complain about the lack of proper types and modularity. There are experiments to address this, such as Nickel (https://github.com/tweag/nickel).

It is understandable that a one-pager may not have space for the whys.

Nickel：Nickel is a straightforward configuration language aimed at automatically generating static configuration files. Essentially, it's akin to JSON with the addition of functions and types.

Also look at nickel which is an evolution of nix. It's my favorite in this space.

nickel-lang.org

https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Nickel is a programming language. While HCL is just a configuration format, so not really comparable.

Here's a comparison with similar tools: https://github.com/tweag/nickel#comparison

As for 'providence', I suppose you meant provenance :) it's been delayed because this was less critical for 1.0 to decide on or to implement (as it: it doesn't break backward compatibility in any way to add this feature in the short term), but this is very much on the roadmap: Issue #235. That's a must-have in a language with merging like Nickel.