conference logo

Playlist "NixCon 2023"

Nuenv: an experimental derivation builder for Nix

Luc Perkins

Nuenv is an alternative builder for Nix derivations that uses Nushell rather than Bash. It offers enhanced expressiveness and type safety to Nix.

While Bash is a tried-and-true and highly well-known quantity, it's not particularly expressive and it has known "footguns" surrounding things like string parsing. Nushell is a recent entry into the world of shells. It's written in Rust and it offers robust data types and safety guarantees that have a lot to potentially offer to Nix. In this talk, I'll teach you not just about Nushell, how I built it, and how it works, but also about the realisation process itself.