• she/her

Principal engineer at Mercury. I've authored the Dhall configuration language, the Haskell for all blog, and countless packages and keynote presentations.

I'm a midwife to the hidden beauty in everything.

💖 @wiredaemon


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Gabriella439
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bay area
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cohost.org/newmoon

This command allows you to add a derivation directly to the /nix/store without using the Nix front-end language, paving the way for many more alternative front-ends to the Nix store (like Guix, where the front-end language is Guile Scheme)

This is particularly exciting to me because it means that you could in theory turn Fall-from-Grace into a front-end for the Nix store and get a typed alternative to Nix. The main downside to that is having to reinvent all of Nixpkgs and NixOS (so it likely won't happen in practice), but it's still neat that it's possible.

I think the actual practical value of this is that a lot of businesses with bespoke build systems could replace the backend of their build system with the Nix store and then the front-end of the their build system is just a glorified wrapper around nix derivation add, allowing them to leverage Nix's support for build isolation, caching, and distributed builds without having to build it themselves.

h/t to @wiggles for bringing this to my attention


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