@sandro the goal is not to remove shell from the dependency graph (it’s used in stdenv configure scripts anyways!), but to provide a better builder language with features such as structured data and less footguns

What if… #NixOS used #Tcl instead of #Bash?

I present you tcl-stdenv!

Previously

@nixos @tcl @tcltk @tcl @tcl

@clacke @raito I ended up writing a proof of concept https://cdrom.tokyo/notice/Af8WEUo1QkesHl4Sky

@Ericson2314 how is the computed derivations feature going? This is exactly what it should help optimize

@zimbatm @mic92

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. #Tcl would be a really good #NixOS builder language.

• Incredibly portable
• Easily bootstrappable
• Like bash but without many of its pitfalls
• Like lisp but with an arguably cleaner and more familiar syntax

There are also disadvantages, but you can probably count on one hand programming languages that are suited for the task.

@wamserma

RE: https://cdrom.tokyo/objects/6c88a7dc-52bd-4481-879d-78e34dc58b14

@raito @tcltk @clacke @nixos I’ve been planning to try this since forever and I’ve been slowly packaging stuff to that end. #Nix and #Tcl would go so well together!

The #nushell talk at #NixCon reminded me of this again, but my list of ongoing side projects is a little too big at the moment 😅. Still, if anyone is working on it please let me know!

(sorry for the necropost, I just found the thread by browsing tags)

But wait, that was a regular file! A file that can be overwritten (and reset to 0 bytes) by multiple processes, so it could be that I just didn’t see the data in time.

So I tried to make it a FIFO… forgetting that FIFOs are blocking until a reader is set up. My shell instantly locked up, and so did the most random parts of the system

Like… I know it’s required by POSIX, and it’s helpful in scripts, but how is it possible that standalone programs rely on it instead of just… not producing that data.

Just how much data gets produced and the immediately thrown away into /dev/null at any given moment?

Just how much data gets produced and the immediately thrown away into /dev/null at any given moment?

Hmm actually I can easily find that out…

The answer appears to be 0. They just like to know that it’s there

I somehow managed to accidentally delete /dev/null and it’s unbelievable how much stuff relies on writing data to nothing.

• SSH just doesn’t start
• same with tmux
• bash completion doesn’t work and spams errors about _upvars
• I can’t open GUI programs unless I launch them from a terminal that was opened when /dev/null was still there
• Firefox prints assertion failures, then the error handler segfaults (!!)