GNU Guix

[[ Guix]] (IPA: /​ɡiːks/) is a purely functional package manager, and associated free software distribution, for the [[ system]]. In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix does remote procedure calls (RPCs) to the build daemon (the =guix-daemon= command), which in turn performs builds and accesses to the store on its behalf. The RPCs are implemented in the (guix store) module. Please email mailto:[email protected] for questions. Bug reports should be submitted via Email mailto:[email protected] for general issues regarding the GNU system. GNU Guix is based on [[ Nix package manager]]. It implements the same package deployment paradigm, and in fact it reuses some of its code. Yet, different engineering decisions were made for Guix, as described below. Nix is really two things: a package build tool, implemented by a library and daemon, and a special-purpose programming language. GNU Guix relies on the former, but uses Scheme as a replacement for the latter. Using Scheme instead of a specific language allows us to get all the features and tooling that come with Guile (compiler, debugger, REPL, Unicode, libraries, etc.) And it means that we have a general-purpose language, on top of which we can have embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs), such as the one used to define packages. This broadens what can be done in package recipes themselves, and what can be done around them. Technically, Guix makes remote procedure calls to the ‘nix-worker’ daemon to perform operations on the store. At the lowest level, Nix “derivations” represent promises of a build, stored in ‘.drv’ files in the store. Guix produces such derivations, which are then interpreted by the daemon to perform the build. Thus, Guix derivations can use derivations produced by Nix (and vice versa). With Nix and the [[ distribution, package composition happens at the Nix language level, but builders are usually written in Bash. Conversely, Guix encourages the use of Scheme for both package composition and builders. Likewise, the core functionality of Nix is written in C++ and Perl; Guix relies on some of the original C++ code, but exposes all the API as Scheme.