Hacker News Reader

Comment by smnplk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

You can stop recommending that flow (nix on guix), it's not good. You'll know if you try it.

is it good? of course not, but it is an option

Thanks, I'll check it out.

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.

You can just visit https://repology.org/ and see that GNU Guix has the 5th largest repository, ahead of Fedora and Gentoo. This does not include any proprietary packages, which can be added using https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix (though gitlab seems to be dying for me right now?)

I've been running GNU Guix for five years now, after lots of distro hopping, including to and from NixOS. I left Nix because I found the documentation (particularly regarding the language) to be a struggle to work with (though I imagine it's improved since then).

GNU Guix + nonguix + flatpak is perfectly suitable for everyday use.

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.

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?

It's not the Nix/Guile that's expensive, it's situations like:

    let chromium = pkgs.chromium; in 1 + 1

In a maximally eager language you'd need to wait for the entirety of Chromium to build before you can find out what 1 + 1 is.

I checked the spec and Scheme R5RS does have lazy evaluation in the form of promises using "delay" and "force", but I can see why explicitly having to put those everywhere isn't a good solution.

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...

"lots of variable mutation" is more like "variable mutation is no impossible, but not common".

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.

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.

Are there really a lot of alternative Wifi chips that don't require closed blobs? Do you have a list?

Are they found in any laptop that is reasonably available on the market?

I don't think that Guix is punishing users by not supporting non-libre hardware. They are making a choice in what they develop and anybody of similar mind can join their effort.

The nonguix folks are practical. It just stinks that nothing ships with a Wifi chip that doesn't require nonguix pragmatism.

There are some relatively widespread WiFi chipsets for which free firmware is available:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Cons...

Unfortunately, it's hard to be sure when you buy a WiFi device whether it has the right chipset. Also, most laptops come with Intel WiFi, and that requires non-free firmware.

I really don't think you can gain much realistic freedom going without the blob. The powers that be will never let you have a freely modifiable radio transceiver.

The blob is better viewed as a part of the hardware in this case. What's most likely to happen to get rid of the blob is to just put it on the non-modifiable parts of the device. Viewed in this way, the blob is at least something you can practically inspect, unlike the firmware on the chip itself.

See also the discussion on CPU microcode:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...

Open hardware is mostly a lie.

They all run proprietary blobs inside and out. It's ridiculous gatekeeping to say that on the kernel level it's bad, but below it I just put my head in the sand and disregard the millions of lines of closed-source code.

IMHO the stupidest GNU policy is that if a proprietary blob is stored on a flash chip in a gadget, it's ok, but if it's transmitted to the gadget at startup, it's not.

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 does happen, and it happened to me, too.

but the attitude has been changing recently from active shaming for even mentioning non-free stuff, to passive acceptance of pragmatically pointing a newcomer to nonguix.

That's nice to hear. I'm a big fan of lisp and I want to switch to nix or guix at some point in the future.

That's good to hear. The intolerance to non-guix (or, possibly, my perception that it was intolerance) made me shy away from the project. This was especially so because I use repaired devices with proprietary HW that would otherwise have been binned by their owners.

we need to speak up for common sense. i did, maybe too much even, and it has cost me some standing with the project lead... but it must be done nevertheless!

people need to understand what freedom means. sure, do inform others about the downsides of using non-free stuff... but it's very hard to help freedom by shaming and alienating people for trying to use hardware they already own.

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!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com