[Nix-dev] Typing nix − funding campaign

Marc Weber marco-oweber at gmx.de
Thu Jan 12 14:51:37 CET 2017


> 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.
Have you never debugged a "got x but y expected" problem? The typesystem
is there, its just lazy as nix is - typed on evaluation.

If you write such code it helps:
https://github.com/MarcWeber/nixpkgs-haskell-overlay/blob/master/pkgs/haskell-lib.nix

But it turned out (oh surpise) that nix is not the best tool to
implement a brute force solver for hackage packages in.

What about guix https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ ?
Does some typing exist here already?

If you need a nice idea about "how to improve the world" - nix guix and
the JS implemenation (and the 100+ other distros) clearly say that a
cross platform cross language package manage / depndency system is
required to derive .nix / guix /whatsoever packages from ..

It should allow "platforms" (like Haskell) to have "stable bases" to
work on.

That would be awesome and the whole open source community & nix would
benefit IMHO.

Marc Weber


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