Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix

Re:Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix by kungito on Thursday December 02, 2021 @06:23AM (#29414816)

I really wish there was a statically typed alternative to nix. Nix docs are horrible and incomplete and the language is called the same as the rest of tye ecosystem so it's hard to google. I don't think there can be a good declarative functional language without static types because how the hell do you debug? I'ts been really hard whenever I have to do something in a bigger nix environment. I get the same feeling like when I jump into a bigger Python project which isn't documented and I have to read around to see what is what, only goto definition doesn't work, the language is weird and everything is some specific function which I don't know is built in or where it's from and googling gives no answers except maybe link to source code

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Re:Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix by southerntofu on Thursday December 02, 2021 @06:30AM (#29414866)

I strongly agree with your sentiment. Both nix and guix have terrible error messages and searching the web for answers if doomed to failure. Although i must point out both have very friendly communities and asking for help in chat is likely to yield constructive answers.

As guix has shown, nix principles can be applied as a DSL/library within your favorite language of choice. I would be curious to see what a "rustix" would look like!

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Re:Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix by aseipp on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:45AM (#29417542)

For error messages I think you're ultimately a bit cornered. Even typed languages have serious problems with straightforward and reliable errors, everything else aside. The ones that do tend to have to make careful tradeoffs in the system to achieve that (HKDs probably just straight up make error messages worse, for instance.) That said I think having types would be useful for helping navigate code, but I think you'd need a fairly advanced type system to capture all the "open ended" parts of Nixpkgs, and that's where all the value really is, the tons of little ways people have built up to use it over time. So it's a mixed bag. I sympathize though; I've spent a lot of time on spurious Nix bullshit, even if I still love the tools.

As a contributor I actually think that the success of projects like TypeScript have shown that there should be a way to build a type checker for something like Nix, with incremental migration. But it probably isn't going to be the ideal solution we could all imagine and it will be very very difficult nonetheless. But it could work with the code we have now, and that's a very important bar to clear (I don't take some of the other suggestions like "auto translate 30,000 packages to some other better language that doesn't exist & isn't the one people are using now" all too seriously, I'm afraid.)

I do think having a store implementation (even a "virtual one") decoupled from the evaluator and builder tooling is a step in the right direction for experimentation and hope that it works out.

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