[Nix-dev] Nix 0.16 released

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new stable release of the
Nix package manager.  Release 0.16 can be found at

  http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-0.16

This release has the following improvements:

  * The Nix expression evaluator is now much faster in most cases: typically, 3
    to 8 times compared to the old implementation. It also uses less memory. It
    no longer depends on the ATerm library.

  * Support for configurable parallelism inside builders. Build scripts have
    always had the ability to perform multiple build actions in parallel (for
    instance, by running make -j 2), but this was not desirable because the
    number of actions to be performed in parallel was not configurable. Nix now
    has an option --cores N as well as a configuration setting build-cores = N
    that causes the environment variable NIX_BUILD_CORES to be set to N when
    the builder is invoked. The builder can use this at its discretion to
    perform a parallel build, e.g., by calling make -j N. In Nixpkgs, this can
    be enabled on a per-package basis by setting the derivation attribute
    enableParallelBuilding to true.

  * nix-store -q now supports XML output through the --xml flag.

  * Several bug fixes.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/