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Comment by teh | Hacker News Reader

We're using Nix in production. It has some polish issues but even in its unpolished state Nix is adding a lot of value for us.

I meet people that have all kinds of familiar issues with puppet, chef etc. We used to have those problems and we just don't have any more.

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That's exactly what I think is so neat about it. puppet, chef, ansible, are all really cool, and they manage to bolt a declarative and atomic looking facade onto something that is decidedly not declarative or atomic (a regular old operating system). But, NixOS hits the problem in the gut. It seems like everything that is hard about the problem disappears when your entire OS is built from the ground up to be declarative and atomic.

It's pretty neat, and once I get my current projects squared away, I want to spend some time with NixOS, and maybe even get involved. It's just such a nice idea, and doesn't make me feel queasy the way so many of the bolted on solutions do.

A minor correction as a courtesy to other readers: puppet, chef, etc are not atomic. They can usually be considered thread safe across processes, if for some reason you run two simultaneously, but that is not a guarantee. Their changes are visible while they are executing on the system, so to other unrelated processes, they are not atomic.

Nix is atomic.

Not so much a correction...I think saying it is "a declarative and atomic looking facade" implies it is not actually that, even though it might look like it, doesn't it? But, perhaps it is a worthwhile clarification.

>>when your entire OS is built from the ground up to be declarative and atomic

entire OS?? I guess, the kernel is still imperative and not declarative.

That's true. And, Apache, the databases, etc. are all challenging. But, one step at a time. NixOS is several steps ahead of what the rest of us are doing (my products run predominantly on CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, with a small number running on FreeBSD and a few other outliers).

I'm pretty excited about rust based operating system experiments, though it'll probably be 10+ years before we can start using them seriously in production (and operating system kernels have a lot of unpleasant stateful things to deal with, so likely will never be particularly pure no matter what language they're written in).

Anyway, Nix is cool stuff that I think is interesting and novel.

What has rust to do with Nix?

Nothing. It's just a more trustworthy language for building a kernel or other systems software. I was just rambling about cool shit happening in the OS development space.

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