[pxc]

I'm really optimistic about Nickel, which is a new DSL based on Nix (in terms of inspiration) and designed for Nixpkgs-like use, but informed by the designs of other DSLs in the same space (e.g., Starlark, CUE, JSonnet).

One of the things it adds over Nix's design is types (it grew out of early efforts to add gradual typing to Nix). It has a gradual typing system with 'contracts' for dealing with untyped code.

I have spent some time doing exercises and examples in it, first in Nix code and then translating it to Nickel. It feels very Nix-y, in the best way, and I think in the end it will be very nice to use.

Definitely check it out if you have thoughts about Nixlang and how it could be better! Development is very active and the maintainers seem quite appreciative of testing and feedback.

https://github.com/tweag/nickel

[unshavedyak]

I've been patiently waiting the nickel<->nixpkgs integration. Several hurdles they have to solve first though, iirc, but yea Nickel looks great.

Really that's almost all of my issues with Nix[(pkgs|os)]. Nickel hopefully solves that quite well.. we just need it to work with Nix first, which is a big hurdle on its own.