[Nix-dev] Perl -> C++

[Harald van Dijk]

On 02/01/2016 18:44, Jookia wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 10:12:50PM +1100, stewart mackenzie wrote:
>> I'm aware that Rust can replace Perl via FFI it's the added deps that
>> concern me
>
> Could you elaborate on this? I've seen a lot of talk about dependencies but what
> exactly is the problem? Portability sounds like a genuine concern, but you can
> still be portable with a lot of dependencies as long as they're portable.

If I want to compile and run Nix on a non-NixOS distribution, I would 
need to first install Rust, preferably from that distro's packages. 
There's a risk that the distro doesn't provide Rust at all. There's a 
risk that if the distro does provide Rust, then it isn't the right 
version for Nix. In either of those cases, I would then first need to 
install Rust without the help of *any* package manager. That's a serious 
obstacle for new users to getting started with Nix. That's a potentially 
serious obstacle for existing users to converting other systems to 
Nix/NixOS as well.

The current dependencies (bzip2, curl, sqlite, perl) could already be a 
small problem for the same reason, but at least it is a list of very 
stable software that's widely available in pretty much all package 
repositories. Rust is not yet in the same category, as far as I know.

Cheers,
Harald van Dijk