[Nix-dev] Using Nix as the preferred package manager for a new language

[Rok Garbas]

Quoting stewart mackenzie (2016-02-09 18:32:01)
> We're doing almost exactly this at github.com/fractalide/fractalide.
> Fractalide is a Flow-based programming language implemented in Rust
> 
> We're also facing many of the issues you are :-)
> 
> Rust has a slow compilation, so nix's lazy evaluation means (after a
> long initial build of every component) we only compile the needed
> dependency chain after a change thereafter. Secondly we've have a
> component_lookup (which maps a common name such as
> 'maths_boolean_nand' to /nix/store/<hash>-maths_boolean_nand) of which
> every single component is dependent, so we have to build everything
> first time round.
> 
> The only way around this I see: is a conservative language extension
> to hopefully make fbp expressive enough to be able directory walks. ie
> similar to ./. in nix.
> Then...
> The path I'd like to go is that of guix and implement our own nix in
> fbp (bootstrapping with nix) thus we can have a coordination layer
> over rust flow based programming components and components wrapped
> around other non-rust projects such as postgres etc. This would be
> activated as simple as `postgres_instance_1(postgres)`.
> 
> Say for example:
> 
> 'path:(path="${fractalide_docs}")' -> www_dir server(web_server)
> 'domain_port:(domainPort="localhost:8080")' -> domain_port server()
> 
> Normally the above wouldn't be committed into the fractalide repo but
> having a "fractalnix" means ${fractalide_docs} could be evaluated. I'm
> unsure of the details as yet.
> 
> Anyway keen to see this conversation take off!
> 

You could also create a wrapper around nix-build/nix-shell and generate part of
the derivation and feed it to standard buildFlowPackage function, right? Also
instead of generating you could also define a json format or any other format
but then you would have to implement a parser in nix yourself, but it is still
possible.


--
Rok Garbas - http://www.garbas.si
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