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Roxy's Blog on Zombie Zen
Personal blog · zombiezen.com/blog · on HN as zombiezenprogrammingsystems
Roxy's Blog on Zombie Zen is a personal blog at zombiezen.com about programming and systems. Since 2022, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Roxy's blog for posts on Nix and build systems, including the early-stage design of the zb build tool and why Nix works well or poorly as a server OS.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-23
- Zb: An Early-Stage Build System3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-19
- Zb Build Tool Beta Released2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-16
What Hacker News says?
Thank you! My name is Roxy. https://www.zombiezen.com/blog/2024/07/my-name-is-roxy/
Comment linking /blog/2024/07/my-name-is-roxy/
on “Zb: An Early-Stage Build System”Submitted Zb: An Early-Stage Build System as a story · 254 points
HN discussionYup, that was how I built the prototype: https://www.zombiezen.com/blog/2024/06/zb-build-system-proto... The last commit using that approach was https://github.com/256lights/zb/tree/558c6f52b7ef915428c9af9... if you want to try it out. And actually, I haven't touched the Lua frontend much since I swapped out the backend: the .drv files it writes are the same. The motivation behind replacing the backend was content-a…
Comment linking /blog/2024/06/zb-build-system-prototype/
on “Zb: An Early-Stage Build System”Submitted Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter as a story · 90 points
HN discussionThere is no technical barrier against doing that. But much of the power and flexibility in nixpkgs arises from the nix language, not the data model (which is comparatively simple). For example, see zb: https://www.zombiezen.com/blog/2024/09/zb-early-stage-build-... Using a different language to depend on packages derived from .nix would be very much akin to depending on a docker image whose Dockerfile you can not in…
Comment linking /blog/2024/09/zb-early-stage-build-system/
on “NixOS is a good server OS, except when it isn't”Submitted Zb Build Tool Beta Released as a story · 12 points
HN discussionIt's not Rust, it's not production ready, and I haven't actually used it (only read the README and blog posts), but I really enjoy the ideas behind https://github.com/256lights/zb - see https://www.zombiezen.com/blog/2024/09/zb-early-stage-build-... for a list of these ideas.
Comment linking /blog/2024/09/zb-early-stage-build-system/
on “The next generation of Bazel builds”Submitted Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zb Beta Released as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zombiezen.com/go/SQLite reaches 1.0 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nix from the Ground Up (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion