There's also nix-darwin and home-manager. I barely use brew anymore, not directly anyway, for the rare packages that aren't in nixpkgs.

Can you provide some links to some projects? You’ve piqued my interest

Well, we have the ambition to make it a sort of Godbolt for Nix, but none of us are frontenders and it's not quite as visually impressive and easy to follow as the actual Godbolt. It does work, though!

We've also been thinking about ways to make nixpkgs available there. Adding `lib` at least in some fashion would be quite useful, I think.

nix modules have types. in flakes they can be quasi statically verified

I would recommend against using Tvix at this time, but if you are wondering why they wrote it, they wrote an article: https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix

The goals they list are:

> Creating an alternative implementation of Nix that is fully compatible with nixpkgs.

No explanation needed.

> More efficient Nix language evaluation, leading to greatly increased performance.

The Nix language is evaluated whenever doing the Nix equivalent of installing a package, or rebuilding your configuration. Note that most of the time it's "fast enough" but the authors of Tvix are doing more with the Nix language (which leads into)

> No more strict separation of evaluation and build phases: Generating Nix data structures from build artefacts ("IFD") should be supported first-class and not incur significant performance cost.

and

> Well-defined interaction protocols for how the three different components (evaluator, builder, store) interact.

As it currently works, the Nix language is evaluated to something called a derivation, which is a specific format for defining how to build something (including a list of dependencies). The derivation is then used to actually build the artifact. This is about when you want the metaphorical snake to eat its tail and have the results of a derivation be more nix language to evaluate.

> A builder implementation using OCI instead of custom sandboxing code.

Hermetic builds require some sandboxing; Using OCI containers seems like an obvious choice, but didn't exist when Nix was first created.

It looks like they’ve factored out the main features of Nix into modules to allow for more flexibility regarding the implementation details of each underlying service.

Not ready, so not a good reason to use it yet.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Tvix developer here; we do have Windows in mind. Rust makes a bunch of things easier regarding this, but _not everything_. It's not a priority.

The location of the store is not really the main blocker in those sorts of situations, IMHO.

I recently learnt about this: https://nlnet.nl/project/libnix/

A project funded by the EU to bring Nix to Windows.

(edit: typo and clarity)

Привет) Almost everyone on the team speaks a language where this pronunciation is obvious (most prominently Russian and German, but it also works in e.g. Swedish).

I've noticed when talking to English native speakers that Brits seem to get it right away and say something close to "твикс", whereas Americans almost always say "tee-vix" ("тивикс") and need serious convincing work to switch over to how we say it.

I think the more likely etymology is because it's from The Virus Lounge. Tvix = The Virus Lounge Nix.

I would pronounce it tee-vix, because of the stock ticker symbol TVIX[0] which was a leveraged volatility ETN and very popular in its day. a little too popular - credit suisse delisted it a couple months after the initial market crash brought on by the pandemic caused it to skyrocket

naming is hard :)

0. https://www.thestreet.com/etffocus/market-intelligence/rip-t...

I pronounce it "tiv icks". Remember DIVX?

Tvix developer here; correctness is still not guaranteed, there's nothing to use here except if you already understand well Nix concepts to pick parts and build stuff on the top of it and accept the inherent instability :).

builtins.fetchTarball is not there, among others, and from watching Matrix I think there are still some things in nixpkgs that eval slightly differently in tvix.

It feels like things are heating up, and "soon" is on the horizon.

Check out devenv.sh from the Cachix people, it allows you to list stuff like pip for any language, including services / postgresql extensions:

   { pkgs, ... }: {
   services.postgres = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.postgresql_15;
    initialDatabases = [{ name = "mydb"; }];
    extensions = extensions: [
      extensions.postgis
      extensions.timescaledb
    ];
    settings.shared_preload_libraries = "timescaledb";
    initialScript = "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb;";
  };
   }

> is there some way to specify dependencies in C? Like requirements.txt in Python, where you put libraries names and versions and the user has to run a single command to install them (and without requiring root privileges)?

I'd describe this as "(language-specific) package management".

"Requiring root privileges" is more/less equivalent to "packages get installed in a system-wide location".

There are some C or C++ specific package managers.. but, essentially what's missing is the ecosystem/culture for providing a packages for those. -- e.g. With the Rust, packages use Cargo.

> Is this nix/tvix/guix an equivalent of pip?

Nix and guix are system package managers.

Since they're powerful tools, one popular use case is for providing dependencies for C projects.

Nix practically requires root for its installation. (i.e. installing it without root may be possible, but I'd think it's impractical). Although once installed, it can provide packages without needing root.

Yes, write either a shell.nix or flake.nix file

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Development_environment_with_nix-she...

It's possible, just beware that other-distro versions of Nix are pretty aggressive at patching themselves into your shell profiles, which is often undesirable.

Yes, Nix can do that. Another (simpler IMO) alternative is vcpkg.