[Nix-dev] Perl -> C++

[Herwig Hochleitner]

As I understand it, the primary motivation for reimplementing those tools
is to tighten the bootstrapping - cycle for new platforms. So while there
might many conveivable languages to do this in (I'd personally lean towards
an existing, self-hosted vm like pypy or racket), discussing just the
language misses the point.

The focus is getting NixOS onto a completely new platform, like "gcc just
started supporting it" new. That means no existing linux distro whose tools
we can reappropriate. It means manually cross-compiling everything you need
to get nix itself running. As an excercise, try to port nixos onto
Raspberry PI, without starting from the existing build or from Raspbian.

While I find Rust and other new languages appealing, any serious proposal
needs to start from the following points:
- what platforms does it support
- how hard is it to cross-compile
- how hard is it to target to new machine architectures
- how big is the build-time closure

I don't think anything comes close to C(++) for those points. I think the
best trade-off for high-level features might be in languages that transpile
to dependency-free C, like http://nim-lang.org/, maybe also
ultra-lightweight embedded vms like lua.
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