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The whole thing is enticing. I'm looking at it as a replacement for tool version managers like NVM, pyenv, asdf and probably as a replacement for local Docker.

by ivanb 3y ago

The whole thing is enticing. I'm looking at it as a replacement for tool version managers like NVM, pyenv, asdf and probably as a replacement for local Docker. There is, however, a doubt that I might fight it more than I would benefit from it. After all, the IDEs were not designed to work in Guix environment. There is no way to tell without trying, I guess.

dannymi 3y ago
It depends on your use case. For example, .NET core is nonexistent in Guix and nobody in the community seems to have any use for it. Also, there's an upstream bug report in dotnet core stating that it doesn't have functioning bootstrapping (AT ALL), and Microsoft doesn't care. Java bootstrapping in Guix actually works pretty well, but only up to (and somewhat excluding) Maven. Everything higher than that is extremely difficult to build without cheating. So I'd say if you use C, C++, Rust, Scheme, Haskell, R, Python, Ruby, Perl or stuff like that, Guix is awesome. For Java with Ant, it's ok (something like 20 different Java VM and JDK packages are in guix, so you can do everything Java can do). For Java EE, it's doable but convoluted (just install binary IntelliJ community edition from IntelliJ's website, for example). I'm using that myself, on Guix, and it's ok. For .NET, ha ha, better be prepared to use mono from Xamarin. Realistically, .NET is not working. .NET IDEs? Nope. >After all, the IDEs were not designed to work in Guix environment It depends on how much they need to be designed for that. It works very well for IntelliJ, and I don't think that IntelliJ can tell at all that it's inside a guix profile. What is true is that IDEs could make more use of the EXTRA power that guix gives (like guix build --with-source and guix build --with-patches in order to automatically patch dependencies for quick tests), and it's totally annoying that they don't. Note that Docker is also available in Guix, both the actual daemon (not that guix uses it...) and as a guix build output target.

by ivanb 3y ago

dannymi 3y ago

It depends on your use case. For example, .NET core is nonexistent in Guix and nobody in the community seems to have any use for it. Also, there's an upstream bug report in dotnet core stating that it doesn't have functioning bootstrapping (AT ALL), and Microsoft doesn't care. Java bootstrapping in Guix actually works pretty well, but only up to (and somewhat excluding) Maven. Everything higher than that is extremely difficult to build without cheating. So I'd say if you use C, C++, Rust, Scheme, Haskell, R, Python, Ruby, Perl or stuff like that, Guix is awesome. For Java with Ant, it's ok (something like 20 different Java VM and JDK packages are in guix, so you can do everything Java can do). For Java EE, it's doable but convoluted (just install binary IntelliJ community edition from IntelliJ's website, for example). I'm using that myself, on Guix, and it's ok. For .NET, ha ha, better be prepared to use mono from Xamarin. Realistically, .NET is not working. .NET IDEs? Nope. >After all, the IDEs were not designed to work in Guix environment It depends on how much they need to be designed for that. It works very well for IntelliJ, and I don't think that IntelliJ can tell at all that it's inside a guix profile. What is true is that IDEs could make more use of the EXTRA power that guix gives (like guix build --with-source and guix build --with-patches in order to automatically patch dependencies for quick tests), and it's totally annoying that they don't. Note that Docker is also available in Guix, both the actual daemon (not that guix uses it...) and as a guix build output target.