Comment by smnplk
8 hours ago
Guix looks really tempting to me because i find guile scheme so much more pleasant than nix. But i heard there are not that many packages in Guix. I wonder if some sort of transpiler from nix derivations to guix package definitions would be possible.
You can run Nix packages on Guix if there isn't a "native" package for it. Look at nix-service.
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Miscellaneous...
I've never felt the need myself. If something is missing, I add it and I think that is the real fun in running Guix because creating your own well defined package or service is deeply rewarding.
Anyway, you can find people using it in the wild either by search engine[1] or with Toys[2] which is also handy for finding examples of missing packages too.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=%22config.scm%22+nix-servic...
[2]: https://toys.whereis.social
This is where I'm at after using Nix for a few years for different use cases. I never want to write it again, and would welcome a Scheme over Nix.
The nix language is maximally lazy. It does not evaluate things it does not need to. This is good because you don't want it to burn CPU building things (very expensive expressions!!) that it will ultimately not need for final derivation. I'm wondering if guix scheme is suited well for this task:
(a) evaluation is eager
(b) lots of variable mutation.
But perhaps lazy evaluation and lack of variable mutation in guix scheme is not such a problem after all for a nix _like_ system -- I don't know.
I'm still new to both Guile and Guix, but I've been reading the Guile and Guix reference manuals recently and I think some of your concerns about eager vs. lazy evaluation of packages are addressed by Guile's quoting mechanism, more specifically "quasiquote" [1]. This quoting mechanism allows passing around references to package definitions and whatnot, without actually evaluating those expressions until build time. Guix extends quasiquote to create something called "G-expressions" [2], which are even more so fitted to something like the Guix/Nix build system.
1. https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Expressi...
2. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/guix.html#G_002dExpress...
Im very familiar with Nix or the language, but why would interpreting guile scheme for package management be expensive? What are guix and nix doing that would require evaluating everything lazily for good enough performance?
Im with you. As an emacsen, i feel it’s natural for me to use Guix, but nix is so so much more popular… :/
Guix being a GNU project the purism also doesn't help. Just look at this: https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix
I don't even disagree that nonfree software is bad, but blaming the users who often have no choice in the matter (e.g. drivers) is the wrong way to go.
nonguix is similar to debian's non-free sources. It's also maintained by many of the same contributors to guix. Enabling it is also similar to how you enable it for Debian. I have never seen anyone blamed or shamed for using nonfree drivers by the guix community, which I can say has been a very warm and welcoming community.
It's a little inconvenient but for example my Framework laptop Intel WiFi chip requires a binary blob and I want aware of this. Now that I am, I can make better hardware purchasing decisions. There are plenty of alternatives that don't require that blob and it's the only thing I need from the no free channel.
3 replies →
I compile nix derivations to well-posed effect/coeffect/graded monad algebra so I can do real bill of materials and build on an action cache engine maintained by professionals, but that's mostly for long-tail stuff.
These days with a la carte access to all of the container ecosystem primitives as nice, ergonomic, orthogonal operations I don't really see the value in nixpkgs. Don't really see the value in a container registry either: a correctly attested content addressable store with some DNS abbreviations is 100 lines of code because mostly it's git and an S3 shim.
The category error at the heart of nixpkgs is that the environment in which software is compiled need resemble the environment in which it executes. Silly stuff. So whether you're a patchelf --rpath ... Person or an unshare --bind-mount Enjoyer (isomorphic), just remember, in 2026 the guy with the daemon that runs as root does not want you to have nice things.
Now if we could just get people to combine Guix and other guile scheme packages that are awesome like mcron into their stacks, and then backfeed more fixes into the ecosystem, we have a real chance at helping GNUland!