[Nix-dev] Re: Bootstrapping nix

[Vladimír Čunát]

I forgot to read the references in the first mail... got it now,
thanks to Viric on IRC.

But it isn't such a bad idea, e.g. compiling nix into Haskell (instead
of interpreting it like now) would have some advantages and IMO it
wouldn't be hard to implement since haskell and nix have much in
common (functionality, laziness, ...).
In exchange we could for example:
 - interpret the expressions via ghci and debug them there
 - compile whole nixpkgs into a haskell library (or a tree of modules
for easier rebuilding after a change happens) - this could lead to big
evaluation speedups
 - easier modify or extend the nix language

Even without this, it would be beneficial to be able to generate nix
expressions on-demand (since nix is lazy), for example from haskell or
scripts. I see a good application at least for hackage packages.

What do you think about this? Seriously, it's not April 1 anymore ;-)

Vlada