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A comment on The Curse of NixOS. Parent comment

Re:The Curse of NixOS by kaba0 on Monday January 24, 2022 @04:38PM (#30064405)
Wow, I just commented that dhall would probably be a fruitful language to consider for nix! And it seems to exist, though according to the readme, general recursion, not strongly typed code and row polymorphism is not supported by dhall but is used heavily by nix :/

Do you by chance know whether a non-Turing complete language like Dhall would be enough to “replace” nix?

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Re:The Curse of NixOS by ghostwriter on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:49PM (#30065852)
> Do you by chance know whether a non-Turing complete language like Dhall would be enough to “replace” nix?

Realistically, I'd say Dhall should be viewed as a complimentary typed DSL for Nix instead "a replacement". Dhall shines when it's used as a code-generator for recursive Nix expressions from typed configs that capture the intent of a build pipeline. You can see how it can be generated from this Haskell example, for instance [1]. The [2] shows you the available constructs, that do support recursive calls and recursive Nix sets.

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dhall-nix-1.1.23/docs/Dh...

[2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hnix-0.14.0.2/docs/Nix-E...

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