[Nix-dev] Typing nix − funding campaign

Shea Levy shea at shealevy.com
Thu Jan 12 14:25:06 CET 2017


Hi Théophane,

Can you give a specific case where your type system would improve things
for either users or developers of nixpkgs? In my experience most of the
nix "code" I write is really just declaration or bash programming, and
it's not clear to me how different types would help.

Thanks,
Shea

Théophane Hufschmitt <rg_nixos at regnat.ovh> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am Théophane Hufschmitt, a french master degree CS student, and I
> wish to start a six month length internship on giving nix a type
> system.
>
> Numtide offered to fund a part of the internship, but we still need
> some help for me to be able to start it.
>
> The goal of the internship is to design (and implement) a type system
> for nix in order to be able to statically get some guaranties about
> the well-foundness of the nixpkgs repo (or any nix expression), in
> complement to hydra or travis tests which may let some inconsistencies
> pass − especially on nixos module system which is way harder to test.
>
> Providing nix with a proper type system is a long running issue (see
> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/14), and I think a huge
> opportunity for nix to improve its awesomeness.
>
> The crowdfunding campaign (and a slightly more detailled description of
> the project) is open at https://www.gofundme.com/typing-nix, and you
> are all invited to donate.
>
> Of course, I'll be happy to answer any question, by mail or on
> irc/matrix (I am regnat[m] on freenode).
>
> -- 
> Théophane Hufschmitt
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 832 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20170112/df3346be/attachment.sig>


More information about the nix-dev mailing list