[Nix-dev] Compiling Nix code

[Michael Raskin]

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On 02/25/2010 04:38 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Or you compile to some byte-code representation
>> where variables point to closures in the heap that are overwritten by their
>> normal forms when entered.  I'm sort of leaning towards that approach (compile
>> to Parrot or Guile or whatever).
>
> Of course, I’m somewhat biased as to which solution you should choose
> ;-), but here’s how it could work with Guile:
> 
>   - There’d be a compiler front-end for the Nix language.  It would
>     compile to the ‘Tree-IL’ language, which is roughly residual Scheme
>     code after macro expansion [0].

Now what is the benefit of not compiling into Scheme code for an actual
compiler?

>   - The lexer and parser themselves can be translated from Flex/Bison to
>     SILex [1] and ‘parse-lalr’ [2].

Or just used as is in a shared library. Less changes - less bugs in
transition to hunt.

>   - Since Tree-IL is call-by-value, parameters in a function call would
>     need to wrapped in a R5RS ‘delay’ form or rather a SRFI-45 ‘lazy’
>     form [2].  If need be, promises can be made more efficient by adding
>     special VM support.

Fortunately, that can be done in any Scheme and in many functional
languages.

>   - Attribute sets could be implemented on top of Bagwell’s vlist-based
>     hash lists, a purely functional dictionary type [4].

Why not use whatever hashtable performs best? Obviously, Nix code will
not be able

> As a bonus Nix programs would be able to use other Guile libraries.
> Imagine yourself writing a multi-threaded, Unicode-capable, GTK+ or

Unicode-capable? Please make Unicode-capable version of Guile the
default in Nixpkgs. (string-length "я") -> 2.

Yes, guile_1_9 just fails on this test in a UTF-8 locale.

mzscheme and ikarus handle this correctly - just in case anyone cares.

Among Lisps sbcl, clisp and ecl also handle this as they should.

> networking app in Nix!  :-)

Great. There goes reproducibility. I thought about adding new
possibilities to Nix to enable loading shared libraries long ago, but
never found a way to check that it will not add too much randomness into
evaluation.

Why would I want to write a GUI application in Nix??
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