Nix

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.

The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat. These should be resolved now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The Nix website has moved to nixos.org (hosted at TU Delft). The Subversion repositories have moved to svn.nixos.org. See this mailing list posting for information about moving existing SVN working copies.

Eelco Dolstra presented the paper “Maximal Laziness — An Efficient Interpretation Technique for Purely Functional DSLs” at 8th Workshop on Language Description, Tools and Applications (LDTA 2008). It’s about caching of evaluation results in the Nix expression evaluator as a technique to make a simple term-rewriting evaluator efficient. Slides are here.

The Jacquard program of NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4 years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these positions, please have a look at this page, and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco Visser or Eelco Dolstra.