Stuff for Nix

Nix sure is something. Ostensibly, it's an interpreter for a lazy functional DSL that excels at specifying reproducible builds. This is then adapted to a package and configuration manager that lets you treat your system configuration as object code. It has its quirks and frustrations:

• The language is supposedly a straightforward lazy dynamically typed ML, but:
  • you get no pattern matching outside of function heads that take “attrsets” (Nix-speak for string-indexed hash maps),
  • and so much of idiomatic Nix revolves around exploiting laziness for fixed-point knot-tying magic that it's incredibly easy to get infinite recursion.
• The packaging conventions leave something to be desired;
  • “closure bloat” is so rampant that you have to put special effort into keeping the runtime footprint of a package small, even when statically linking
  • (this is exacerbated by the “support” for structured and well-defined package flavours, which ranges from “ad-hoc” to “none”).

Oh, and turnaround on rebuilding the system configuration on NixOS is feeling sluggish in recent years. nix-darwin has really spoiled me with how comparatively zippy its rebuilds are.

That being said, it's still infinitely better than anything else with vaguely the same job description, and I can't recommend it enough.

Here are my utilities for Nix:

• dyn, a hacky little quality-of-life package that I use across my server configurations and my nix-darwin setup.
• more to be published Soon™