Re: Maybe a way to get a few more developpers to work on Guix ?

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2023-06-24, Nicolas Graves via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." wrote:
> On 2023-06-24 13:08, Csepp wrote:
>> Nicolas Graves via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:
>> IMHO LLMs for Guix are so damn not worth the effort.  It will not fix
>> any of the actual issues with Guix, like the huge performance gap
>> between it and traditional package managers.
>
> I've also opened another discussion on the subject on guix-devel
> recently. Do you have any benchmark material to back this up?

Well, I just ran "apt update" on Debian, and it took approximately 7
seconds, which was mostly spent downloading moderately sized files from
Debian mirrors (~1MB).

A corresponding "guix pull" took 299 seconds, downloading at least 8MB
(from a quick eyeball calculation as guix does not summarize the results
for me), and compiling all the various guix-*.drv that make up guix
pull. The vast majority of the time was spent compiling
derivations. This was also using a local copy of guix.git, so having to
update guix.git over the network would take even longer... (and it did
even spend a fair amount of time copying from the local guix.git on a
fast NVMe device)

Obviously, guix pull is doing a lot more, but it is ... doing a lot
more!

"apt install hello" (~2.3 seconds) and "guix install hello" (~1.5
seconds) were actually in a similar ballpark, which honestly surprised
me. Guix is much faster with "guix remove hello" ... although arguably
"guix remove hello && guix gc --delete $(guix build hello)" would be a
more similar operation, and although I did not time it, it was
reasonably fast, too.

So, presuming substitutes are available, the main slowness with guix
seems to be guix pull?

I did not test "guix system reconfigure" ... but in a way, that may be a
more real comparison than "guix install" ... although we are starting to
get into fundemental differences between apt and guix here.

The other big factor in my mind is that even with a single generation of
guix with nothing for guix gc to do, there may be multiple copies of
some libraries at various versions left around in the store, which is
probably not terribly space efficient... there are usually reasons for
this (e.g. bootstrapping from a tiny seed, yay!) but nevertheless, those
reasons have some cost (and benefits!).


live well,
  vagrant

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