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guix
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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.
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.
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.
Their software freedom policy seems to be similar to Debian. All free by default, allow separate nonfree addon. In the case of Guix you can find that here: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix .