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Comment by bfrog | Hacker News Reader

There's no cppnix, its just nix. That's some bs naming added on by people (not the creator). The repo and tool are still solidly called nix.

Of course there's corporate sponsorships, how else do you expect people to work on this stuff full time and eat. Food and Shelter aren't handed out for free last I checked.

Mind boggling statements.

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“Nix” is a very overloaded term. It can refer to Nix-the-language, Nix-the-interpreter, Nix-the-command-line-tool etc. CppNix is specifically the code body developed in https://github.com/nixos/nix. It (among other things) implements Nix-the-language. E.g. https://tvix.dev/ also implements Nix-the-language, despite sharing no code with CppNix.

You linked to it, and its repo is nix, the description is "Nix, the purely functional package manager"

I see no mention of CppNix other than from certain detractors.

It’s just a way to distinguish a language from its implementation, similar to Python / CPython, or Rust / rustc, or C / gcc. Yes, officially they’re both named Nix, but that’s not helpful when you’re trying to discuss alternative implementations: “Nix implements Nix” just sounds like a tautology.

I think it's like CPython. The original implementation of the Python programming language was just called Python. Once there were multiple implementations it became useful to call it CPython sometimes. It depends on the context. Nix is both a language and an implementation. Calling the original implementation of Nix CppNix is a way to distinguish it from other implementations (like Tvix or Lix).

Edit: This is not a comment on the rest of the content of your post. I just thought it was kind of fair to call it CppNix!

If I remember correctly originally perl was a large part of nix's implementation. I thought they avoided haskell or another functional programming language in fear of recruitment issues and went with perl in part because it was known by the implementors.

Here is a github issue where they talk about some of the transition to cpp:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/341

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