Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[Olivier Dion via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2022, Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> wrote:

> I can't believe that mess that is Rust cargo and npm packages today,
> for example. And they start out as the next new thing to solve all
> problems! If they would only would have used Guix to create a coherent
> build system...
> 
> And then I spent a week's effort on a CMake build system, and CMake is
> an ugly piece ofp work. I just kept thinking that if Guix was
> leveraged you could have a really simple build generator written in
> Lisp... Now wouldn't that be nice!

I dream of a build system 100% in Scheme that integrates itself natively
with Guix.  No more Makefile, nor auto-nighmares or bloated package
managers that like NPM.  Just a simple self describing Scheme record in
a human readable file that is easily trackabled in Git.

I've made something like this for a project of mine.  Generating a
Makefile from a description of the projects using Scheme.  However, I
believe now that the true power would be to have everything done in
Scheme instead.

On another note, what I find fascinating is why Guix and Nix are not
more used in academic papers.  A quick search on the Compendex database
gives me only a handful of papers referencing Guix, mostly all from
Ludovic.  I simply can't understand this.  You have a way to factor out
the toolchain from the equation of your research's resuls -- making it
trivial to reproduce -- and yet every papers that I read is using some
Ubuntu LTS or Fedora as their build and testing environment.

The same applies for embedded systems.  Why waste time with Yocto, Elbe,
Buildroot anymore?

-- 
Olivier Dion
Polymtl