DEFCON34 wrap-up
I recently came back from DEFCON34 and the nix.vegas community. The talks I gave are now online if you are interested in watching them. 🙌
Farid Zakaria’s Blog
I'm a software engineer, father and wishful amateur surfer. If you've come seeking my political views, you've found the wrong Fareed .
Latest posts
nixpkgs-multiverse: fast mode
“The fastest evaluation is the one that never happens.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of Evaluation
nixpkgs-multiverse is audacitymaxxing
Every package manager on earth picks one version for you. Nixpkgs picked one too. It never had to.
nixpkgs-multiverse: every version that ever existed
Enter the Nixpkgs multiverse. All the versions that ever existed, all in one place.
Super Mario Derivations
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
A C++ toolchain from 357 bytes, in Bazel
I have been fascinated and amazed by stage0 for a while now ever since I learnt about it via Guix using it to provide twenty two thousand packages source-bootstrapped from the 357-byte seed.
The Nix sandbox is a hidden input
The whole beauty of Nix was that it was incredibly pragmatic to achieve “reproducibility”, which is quite an overloaded term. The default model for Nix is the intensional-model which is input-addressed: the hash of a store path is derived from the recipe (derivation) that produced it, and not the bytes that came out of it. In that framing Nix achieves repeatability. Nix, by default, was never…
Nix finally has a source-bootstrapped OpenJDK
One of the earliest requested issues we had opened on GuixPkgs was to add more packages, specifically OpenJDK.
Guix by Nix
I have been working more on GuixPkgs in preparation for a talk at nix.vegas for DEFCON34. At the end of my previous GuixPkgs post I left a teaser:
The mean means nothing
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
Seriously, what is the large code-model even for?
I have been working on making massive binaries possible at $DAYJOB$. One of the Hail Marys that you should be able to rely on is the large code-model (mcmodel=large) as it makes no assumptions about size and distance of relocations.