Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents. Nix's runtime is not magic. Guile should be able to expose a language and evaluate it in a similar way.
For my part, I've not opted into Guix because it's a GNU project, and I've decided to avoid anything in the FSF sphere of influence. Their orthodoxy turns off contributors and they have a history of taking insular hard-liner approaches that are utopian. Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust (which has a community that is not a fan of the GPL), what has had FSF backing and been successful? Linus starts two of the most influential pieces of software in human civilization and RMS wants to name the awards. The pragmatic culture that shifted away from the FSF has I think largely adopted Nix, and it shows. Nix is open for business, available on lots of platforms, has commercial entities built around its success.
For what it's worth the association with GNU is basically historical at this point. RMS has never accepted the original vision of the project (to be the official GNU OS) and the project outgrew GNU's dilapidated infrastructure a long time ago, which the project is finally addressing with the migration to Codeberg. The FSF gave the project a place for people to donate specifically to Guix but have never really embraced it, otherwise. That has been superseded by a dedicated European nonprofit for Guix. The most recent Guix Days gathering before FOSDEM featured a lengthy conversation of breaking ties with GNU entirely but no decision has been made on that, yet.
It seems to me like the better strategy would be to "do the right thing" according to the internal values of the project and make GNU be the one who breaks ties, otherwise the opportunity for positively influencing something important is lost. Still a newcomer though, so that's just my 2c. Hope to be there with y'all in Brussels next year! By the time I found out about it, it was apparently already full.
> Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents.
While that may be true, it is particularly the case for nixpkgs; i.e., you may imagine a contender to nixpkgs that is less tangled.
I’ve recently enjoyed reading on research into simpler alternatives; GrizzlT’s deep-dive into nixpkgs design patterns, and nrdxp’s atom format:
Off the top of my head: GCC, Emacs, coreutils, sed, grep, find, parallel, Guile, Coreboot, GNOME, GIMP, GnuPG, Bash
In each case, development is the work of the developers, and they themselves deserve most credit. But the FSF and the GNU project have certainly been involved with lots of software that is important, widely used, and works well.
GNU software is still responsible for huge and often critical chunks of the stack in most Linux distros.
GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.
Not necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.
"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.
The vulnerability in the thinking is that if GNU can't reliably get crystals started, if the seeds that make it are dependent on some external force like Cygnus or Linux, and dominant GCC can become has-been GCC, maybe we're looking at an afterglow of some luck and experiment that has a very bleak future if left alone.
Maybe people realized the FSF model isn't sustainable, and a model dependent on mass-volunteerism and religious viral spread of cooperative behaviors falls off when the days become months and the months become years. What if the greys are not being replaced by the dabbers. If that's the case, there won't be another bang.
Maybe see what I'm up to with https://prizeforge.com. I'm hoping to get the MVP functioning with semi-decency today. Mac does not agree with the WASM and I have at least one small dirty hack to execute before I can go live.
Already happening my friend. uutils. It is MIT licensed. Funnily, I recall someone had a story at MIT about not liking passwords. I'm sure they were right?
It may be happening in your bubble, yes, but not outside of that. They are not 1:1 replacements at all, with probably logic bugs introduced (see their Issues page) as well (call them regressions). I would not hold my breath if I were you.
Nix is pathologically recursive, lazy, and uses fixed points, things that are very apt to changing something that cascades through a bunch of dependents. Nix's runtime is not magic. Guile should be able to expose a language and evaluate it in a similar way.
For my part, I've not opted into Guix because it's a GNU project, and I've decided to avoid anything in the FSF sphere of influence. Their orthodoxy turns off contributors and they have a history of taking insular hard-liner approaches that are utopian. Outside of coreutils that are about to be fully subsumed by rewrite-it-in-Rust (which has a community that is not a fan of the GPL), what has had FSF backing and been successful? Linus starts two of the most influential pieces of software in human civilization and RMS wants to name the awards. The pragmatic culture that shifted away from the FSF has I think largely adopted Nix, and it shows. Nix is open for business, available on lots of platforms, has commercial entities built around its success.