Implementing the guix-dameon in Guile

[Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net>]

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Hey!

I think this has been talked about for a while [1], but I want to make it
happen. Currently the guix-daemon is still similar to the nix-daemon
that it was forked from, and is implemented in C++. I think that a Guile
implementation of the guix-daemon will simplify Guix and better support
hacking on and around the daemon to add new features and move Guix
forward.

1: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/doc/ROADMAP.org#n71

My plan is to focus on this over the next year. I left my previous day
job quite a few months ago now to take a bit of a break, that's the main
reason I've been able to spend more time trying to push forward some of
the QA stuff. With some monetary support from NLNet [2], I'm planning to
continue this break and focus for the next year on getting a Guile
implementation of the guix-daemon written and adopted.

2: https://nlnet.nl/project/GuixDaemon-Guile/

Rewrites are risky because you only get the value right at the end,
therefore the priority is to get a minimal but viable implementation in
Guile that can be switched to, and not to get distracted on adding or
improving functionality unnecessarily. That is better done once the new
implementation has been adopted.

While I think there's a substantial amount of work to do, progress
towards a Guile guix-daemon has already been made. There was a least one
GSoC project which did make progress, and there's Guile implementations
of some of the functionality in Guix already.

Still though, I'd like to hear what people think about which direction
the implementation should go, and what features they'd like to see. Even
if those are not essential to make the Guile implementation viable, it
still might inform the direction to take.

The Guile rewrite of the guix-dameon was on my mind over 3 years ago
when I was thinking about the build coordinator [3]. As part of writing
the build coordinator, I got experienced using SQLite and the Guile
bindings and that'll come in very useful. The build coordinator also
uses fibers, and I'll probably look to use fibers as well in the
guix-daemon. I think the work Ludo has done on the shepherd has made
this possible.

3: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-04/msg00323.html

Let me know if you've got any comments or questions!

Thanks,

Chris

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