I have wanted to try out some Rust applications in the last weeks. Usually, when I want to try out programs in Guix, I install them directly or create a package for them. But not for programs written in Rust. The Rust ecosystem makes it easy to reuse code, and developers use it excessively. Because of this, packaging such programs is no fun at all.
Right, yeah, so there’s occasionally a bit more jumping through hoops, but the end result is a much more manageable system where eg. updating thing X won’t clobber the fuck out of dependencies that thing Y needed, and in general you get a more “containerised” setup with a declarative way to set it up?
What’s the upside of Guix vs Nix (except eg. the syntax that @tetris11@lemmy.ml mentioned)?
There’s also the fully reproducible build starting from a 357 byte seed file (cpu-specific) + guile library, to generate a full blown fully reproducible OS
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
Huh. Not only is that pretty neat from a nerdy “they did what?” perspective, having a fully reproducible OS setup is definitely very useful in many contexts. No surprise that the first blog post of that series references the classic Thompson Reflections on Trusting Trust paper about his cc backdoor
Yeah, that trusting trust paper really opened my eyes on how compiler development works through a series of hacks