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smnplktoday at 1:37 AM5 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

heavyset_gotoday at 2:34 AM

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.

herewulftoday at 2:46 AM

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

benreesmantoday at 5:20 AM

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.

whompyjawtoday at 1:43 AM

Im with you. As an emacsen, i feel it’s natural for me to use Guix, but nix is so so much more popular… :/

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arminiusreturnstoday at 4:09 AM

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!