Tvix

For more information about Tvix, feel free to reach out. We are interested in people who would like to help us review designs, brainstorm and describe requirements that we may not yet have considered.

Most of the discussion around development happens on our IRC channel, which you can join in several ways documented on tvl.fyi.

There's also some discussion around development on our mailing list.

Building the CLI

If you are in a full checkout of the TVL depot, you can simply run mg build in the cli directory (or mg build //tvix/cli from anywhere in the repo). The mg command is found in /tools/magrathea.

Important note: We only use and test Nix builds of our software against Nix 2.3. There are a variety of bugs and subtle problems in newer Nix versions which we do not have the bandwidth to address, builds in newer Nix versions may or may not work.

The CLI can also be built with standard Rust tooling (i.e. cargo build), as long as you are in a shell with the right dependencies (provided by mg shell //tvix:shell).

Rust projects, crate2nix

Some parts of Tvix are written in Rust. To simplify the dependency management on the Nix side of these builds, we use crate2nix in a single Rust workspace in //tvix to maintain the Nix build configuration.

When making changes to Cargo dependency configuration in any of the Rust projects under //tvix, be sure to run mg run //tvix:crate2nixGenerate -- in //tvix itself and commit the changes to the generated Cargo.nix file.

License structure

All code implemented for Tvix is licensed under the GPL-3.0, with the exception of the protocol buffer definitions used for communication between services which are available under a more permissive license (MIT).

The idea behind this structure is that any direct usage of our code (e.g. linking to it, embedding the evaluator, etc.) will fall under the terms of the GPL3, but users are free to implement their own components speaking these protocols under the terms of the MIT license.