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Lix Development

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(Technical) development of Lix, the package manager, a Nix implementation. Please be mindful of ongoing technical conversations in this channel.138 Servers

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10 Dec 2025
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegames* but in terms of cachable data structures, bytecode gives us that bit for free17:29:28
@charles:computer.surgeryCharles
In reply to @piegames:flausch.social
yes, but the issue is, what is your cache key?
What do other interpreters do?
17:31:54
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesI don't think any other interpreters have comparable performance requirements for parsing17:33:30
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesif there constraints weren't as tight we could just go content-addressed and use a hash17:33:43
@qyriad:katesiria.orgQyriad bytecode is our::Qyriad's long term goal 17:35:18
@qyriad:katesiria.orgQyriad or really whenever someone pays us for it 17:35:25
@qyriad:katesiria.orgQyriad * or whenever someone pays us for it 17:35:36
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesI think browser engines have sufficient control over their baseline caching pipelines and what data changes when that they can probably just track what changes easily, but I'm guessing here17:36:08
@kfears:matrix.orgKFears (they/them)
In reply to @piegames:flausch.social
no, parsing is super fast, mostly thanks to horrors, it's just that Nixpkgs is 3.6MLOC over 40k files and every single NixOS eval loads a good chunk of that, realistically multiple times. The main issue is that caching was never a thought in the architecture and adding it afterwards is really tricky
I don't know how many of those lines are going to be actually parsed (now I wish I could somehow learn that into), but assuming 20% utilization (that doesn't sound too unreasonable, considering that my desktop has 2k packages, but there's a lot of re-evals due to module system, splicing, package variations etc.), that doesn't sound too terrible? Like, other interpreters and compilers probably deal with 700k LOC codebases. How do they deal with that?
17:36:40
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesI'm dreaming of tackling it for 2.96 really17:36:58
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesI already have a half-working prototype from a year ago, horrors had one too, and we should soon have all the parts together for doing it17:37:37
@piegames:flausch.socialpiegamesmain question is whether to do it in C++ or to block it on RPC and do it in Rust17:37:53
@helle:tacobelllabs.nethelle (just a stray cat girl)please don't do it in C++17:38:13

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