Code staging in GNU Guix

Abstract

GNU Guix is a "functional" package manager that builds upon earlier work on Nix. Guix implements high-level abstractions such as packages and operating system services as domain-specific languages (DSLs) embedded in Scheme. It also implements build actions and operating system orchestration in Scheme. This leads to a multi-tier programming environment where embedded code snippets are staged for eventual execution.This paper presents G-expressions or "gexps", the staging mechanism we devised for Guix. We explain our journey from traditional Lisp S-expressions to G-expressions, which augment the former with contextual information and ensure hygienic code staging. We discuss the implementation of gexps and report on our experience using them in a variety of operating system use cases-from package build processes to system services. Gexps provide a novel way to cover many aspects of OS configuration in a single, multitier language, while facilitating code reuse and code sharing.

On business adoption and use of reproducible builds for open and closed source software

“…Fowler argues that being able to reproduce precisely the binaries deployed to the customer's site at some arbitrary point in the past is invaluable support for debugging and fault resolution. The NixOS (Dolstra et al, 2010) and Guix projects (Courtès, 2017(Courtès, , 2013 are Linux package managers designed to allow the user to reproduce software configurations. Both NixOS and Guix implement the functional specification of systems, where packages and their immutable dependencies are specified recursively, and a software build is considered to be a pure function, i.e.…”

“…Both NixOS and Guix implement the functional specification of systems, where packages and their immutable dependencies are specified recursively, and a software build is considered to be a pure function, i.e. "a package's build function is assumed to always produce the same result" (Courtès, 2017). Courtès and Wurmus (2015) describe Guix-HPC (2020) a system for reproducing computational environments on computing clusters.…”

“…The academic literature on R-Bs has largely focused on the technical challenges (de Carné de Carnavalet et al, 2014;Ren et al, 2018Ren et al, , 2019Shi et al, 2021), on supply chain integrity in OSS (Lamb & Zacchiroli, 2021), and on specific implementations of R-Bs such as Guix (Courtès & Wurmus, 2015;Courtès, 2017), NixOS (Dolstra et al, 2010) and in-toto (Torres-Arias et al, 2019). The grey or practitioner literature 1 contains a range of views on R-Bs and some practitioners have identified additional applications of the techniques.…”