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TVL blog
Company blog · tvl.fyi/blog · on HN as tazjinprogrammingsystems
TVL blog is the company blog at tvl.fyi, writing about programming and systems. Since 2021, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the TVL blog for its posts on rewriting Nix as Tvix and on Nix-based infrastructure. The comments mostly cite it as background on the project rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The Virus Lounge
Most-linked posts?
- Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-12-02
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-20
- Tvix status update: A Nix reimplementation in Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-14
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-09
What Hacker News says?
Flakes are "experimental" in the sense that gmail was in "beta" for however many years. I feel like it's important to mention that you're attempting to rewrite nix[1] and explicitly ignoring flakes[2]. Many people using nix are coming to the conclusion that flakes make things much easier to use and understand, and they obviate the need for a lot of secondary tooling that has become standard. There's an easy way to g…
Comment linking /blog/rewriting-nix
on “The Curse of NixOS”Submitted Tvix: We Are Rewriting Nix as a story · 144 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of unexplored potential of Nix in granular build systems and displacing systems like Bazel. If applied correctly, it lets smaller organisations get much of the benefit of Google-style monorepos but without as much maintenance overhead. Some friends and I have been experimenting with this for the last year over at https://tvl.fyi (code etc. is linked at the page bottom). We've run into some issues with…
Comment linking /
on “Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit”Submitted Tvix status update: A Nix reimplementation in Rust as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSee also "Tvix: We are rewriting Nix" - https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix (discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29412971 )
Comment linking /blog/rewriting-nix
on “Our Roadmap for Nix”Submitted Tvix Status – February '24 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome community members have looked into this quite a bit, and personally I have come to the conclusion that types don't really give that much benefit to Nix (and I say this as a Rust & Haskell developer). Nix expressions are almost always[2] short-lived snippets that evaluate to a data structure, not long-running programs where the distinction between "static analysis time" and runtime is extremely relevant. In fact…
Comment linking /
on “We want to make Nix better”Submitted TVL's blog: Tvix Status – August '24 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCome hangout with us https://tvl.fyi/ — the visualisation has some hints :-)
Comment linking /
on “Building Container Images with Nix”Submitted Tvix Nix rewrite: status update as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes, derivations are the main primitive to target in an agnostic way Main challenge is the value of the nixpkgs repo is enormous, and that looks tightly tied to Nix the language and its implicit constructs. I think instead of an FDI one would have to provide a true competitor that is more attractive on multiple dimensions like: - reworking Nix as more a modular architecture (see Tvix: https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-…
Comment linking /blog/rewriting-nix
on “About using Nix in my development workflow”Nix fixes this. See https://tvl.fyi for experiments with rebuilding goog mono repo infra as nix. Specifically https://code.tvl.fyi - which uses josh to serve the mono repro as micro repos. Presenting “views” which have super fast ci/cd implications.
Comment linking /
on “Keeping a project bisectable”I would recommend against using Tvix at this time, but if you are wondering why they wrote it, they wrote an article: https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix The goals they list are: > Creating an alternative implementation of Nix that is fully compatible with nixpkgs. No explanation needed. > More efficient Nix language evaluation, leading to greatly increased performance. The Nix language is evaluated whenever doing th…
Comment linking /blog/rewriting-nix
on “Tvix – A New Implementation of Nix”Yes, there is! We ( https://tvl.fyi ) have been building Nix monorepo tooling for a while. You can see the current state of our repo at cs.tvl.fyi (+ reviews at cl.tvl.fyi and dynamic CI on tvl.fyi/builds). We use josh[0] to let people clone "just in time" repos with the tooling needed for our setup[1]. We've also started a consultancy (tvl.su) that helps companies move onto this setup, and have customers going for…
Comment linking /blog/rewriting-nix
on “Everything you need to know about monorepos”Yes! 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqwEnd_2Vzk (sorry for recording quality but it is worth watching and it'll change how you think about what is possible) 2. http://github.com/ghuntley/ghuntley (see .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and .gitpod.yml for codespaces / gitpod isomorph) 3. https://code.tvl.fyi/tree/ 4. Come find us and hangout https://tvl.fyi/ <3
Comment linking /
on “GitHub Codespaces vs. Gitpod: Choosing the Best Online Code Editor”