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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • The problem is that the Linux kernel is monolithic so introducing rust into it does have certain repercussions about downstream compatibility between modules.

    Right now the rust code in the kernel uses c bindings for some things and there’s a not-insignificant portion of C developers who both refuse to use rust and refuse to take responsibility if the code they write breaks something in the rust bindings.

    If it was pure C there would be no excuse as the standard for Linux development is that you don’t break downstream, but the current zeitgeist is that Rust being a different language means that the current C developers have no responsibility if their code refactoring now breaks the rust code.

    It’s a frankly ridiculous stance to take, considering the long history of Linux being very strict on not breaking downstream code.




  • You can use nix alongside guix, it’ll just double-up the dependencies on disk:

    services (append (list (service nix-service-type))
                        %base-services)))
    

    Services are, in guix terms, any configuration change to a computer, so creating your own service 99% of the time is just extending etc-service-type and creating a variable interface to fill in the config file text yourself

    Creating a service as in a daemon of some kind uses shepherd and involves extending shepherd-service-type or home-shepherd-service-type with your service description, depending on whether the service runs in root or user space.

    Shepherd service configurations aren’t actually part of the guix spec(https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html#Defining-Services), but still use Guile, so you can interoperate them super easily.

    It’s important in guix to understand lisp pretty thoroughly, and knowing how to program lisp is still a very useful skill to have so I’d recommend learning it even if you never touch guix.


  • I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.

    Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.

    Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s