Well, there's Guix as an alternative if you want a similar concept but different implementation philosophy. For me the major disadvantage of Guix is lack of package availability compared to Nix.
Well, there's Guix as an alternative if you want a similar concept but different implementation philosophy. For me the major disadvantage of Guix is lack of package availability compared to Nix.
I really wish Guix worked on macOS. Nix-Darwin and home-manager have been game changers -- sharing much config and tooling between my Mac, arch, and nixos machines has been a blessing.
Isn't there a way to transpile the scripts from Nix to Guix?
In practicing no because in the end it generally takes a human intelligence to fully understand the requirements of a particular program, sanity check everything, get the right dependency versions and fix build errors. For code library repositories like rust, importing is fairy automated since everything is neat, tidy, and regular. But end user applications are more often than not a pain in the ass
That would be possible. The main problem there is that nixpkgs, the package repository one would want to translate, uses a good chunk of specialized build infrastructure (parts in nix, some in rust/Perl/Python) that is designed for nix (the package manger).
Some other semi-specific parts, like stdenv bootstrapping, are also a bit more complex than just some nix build instructions.
It's not to hard to translate manually, but since the dependency tree is massive it doesn't seem feasible to do wholesale.
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AFAIK Guix uses parts of Nix as a backend.
Guix uses a fork of the nix daemon
Guix uses the sandboxing logic iirc