We've now been working on our rewrite of Nix, [Tvix][], for over a
year.
As you can imagine, this past year has been turbulent, to say the
least, given the regions where many of us live. As a result we haven't
had as much time to work on fun things (like open-source software
projects!) as we'd like.
We've all been fortunate enough to continue making progress, but we
just haven't had the bandwidth to communicate with you and keep you up
to speed on what's going on. That's what this blog post is for.
## Nix language evaluator
The most significant progress in the past six months has been on our
Nix language evaluator. To answer the most important question: yes,
you can play with it right now – in [Tvixbolt][]!
We got the evaluator into its current state by first listing all the
problems we were likely to encounter, then solving them independently,
and finally assembling all those small-scale solutions into a coherent
whole. As a result, we briefly had an impractically large private
source tree, which we have since [integrated][] into our monorepo.
This process was much slower than we would have liked, due to code
review bandwidth... which is to say, we're all volunteers. People have
lives, bottlenecks happen.
Most of this code was either written or reviewed by [grfn][],
[sterni][] and [tazjin][] (that's me!).
### How much of eval is working?
*Most of it*! You can enter most (but not *all*, sorry! Not yet,
anyway.) Nix language expressions in [Tvixbolt][] and observe how they
are evaluated.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on under the hood, such as:
* The Tvix compiler can emit warnings and errors without failing
early, and retains as much source information as possible. This will
enable you to use Tvix as the basis for developer tooling, such as
language servers.
* The Tvix compiler performs in-depth scope analysis, so it can both
generate efficient bytecode for accessing identifiers, and alert you
about problems in your code before runtime.
* The runtime supports tail-call optimisation in many (but – again –
not yet all) cases, so you can evaluate recursive expressions in
constant stack space.
* The runtime can give you different backing representations for the
same Nix type. For example, an attribute set is represented
differently depending on whether you've constructed an empty one, a
`name/value` pair, or a larger set. This lets us optimise frequent,
well-known use-cases without impacting the general case much.
We've run some initial benchmarks against C++ Nix (using the features
that are ready), and in most case Tvix evaluation is an order of
magnitude faster. To be fair, though, these benchmarks are in no way
indicative of real-life performance for things like `nixpkgs`. More
information is coming... eventually.
### How does it all work?
Tvix's evaluator uses a custom abstract machine with a Nix-specific
instruction set, and a compiler that traverses a parsed Nix AST to
emit this bytecode and perform a set of optimisations and other
analysis. The most important benefit of this is that we can plan and
lay out the execution of a program in a way that is better suited to
an efficient runtime than directly traversing the AST.
TIP: You can see the generated bytecode in [Tvixbolt][]!
This is all written in about 4000 lines of Rust (naturally), some of
which – especially around scope-handling – are deceptively simple.
As part of our CI suite, we run the evaluator against some tests we
wrote ourselves, as well as against the upstream Nix test suite (which
we don't *quite* pass yet. We're working on it!).
### What's next for tvix-eval?
Despite all our progress, there are still some unfinished feature
areas, and some of them are pretty important:
1. The majority of Nix's builtins – including fundamental ones like
`import` and `derivation` – aren't implemented yet.
2. Neither are recursive attribute sets (`rec`). This isn't because of
a problem with the recursion itself, but because of the handling of
nested keys (such as `a.b`). We have a lackluster solution already,
but are designing a more efficient one.
In both cases, we've mostly figured out what to do; now it's just a
matter of finding the time to do it. Our progress is steady, and can
be tracked [in the source][src] (viewer without Javascript
[here][src-noscript]).
Apart from that, the next steps are:
* Comprehensive benchmarking. We're standing up an infrastructure for
continuous benchmarking to measure the impact of changes. It'll also
let us identify and optimise hotspots
* Implementing known optimisations. There are some areas of the code
that have the potential for significant speed gains, but we're
holding off implementing those until the evaluator is feature
complete and passes the Nix test suite.
* Finishing our language specification. Based on what we've learned,
we're writing a specification of the Nix language that captures its
various behaviours in all their tricky subtlety and subtle trickery.
Once we can evaluate `nixpkgs`, we're likely to shift our focus
towards the other areas of Tvix.
## The Other Areas of Tvix
Speaking of these other areas (most importantly, the builder and store
implementation), we've made some nice progress there also.
While we've yet to start assembling the actual pieces, [flokli][] and
[adisbladis][] have been hard at work on [go-nix][], which aims to
implement many of the low-level primitives required for the Nix store
and builder (hashing and encoding schemes, archive formats, reference
scanning ...).
We're looking forward to telling you more in the next Tvix status
update!
## Outro ...
We'd be delighted to onboard new contributors to Tvix! Please take a
look at the main [TVL page](https://tvl.fyi) to find out how to get in
touch with us if you'd like to join!
Thanks also, of course, to [NLNet](https://nlnet.nl/) for sponsoring
some of this work!
And finally, we would like to thank and pay our respects to jD91mZM2 –
the original author of
[rnix-parser](https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser) – who has
sadly passed away. Please, tell people how important they are to you.
We use `rnix-parser` in our compiler, and its well-designed internals
(also thanks to its new maintainers!) have saved us a lot of time.
That's it for this update. Go play with [Tvixbolt][], have fun
figuring out weird ways to break it – and if you do, let us know.
We'll see you around!
[Tvix]: https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix
[Tvixbolt]: https://tvixbolt.tvl.su
[integrated]: https://cl.tvl.fyi/q/status:merged+%2522tvix/eval%2522+mergedbefore:2022-09-09
[src]: https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot/-/tree/tvix/eval
[src-noscript]: https://code.tvl.fyi/tree/tvix/eval
[tazjin]: https://tazj.in
[grfn]: https://gws.fyi/
[sterni]: https://github.com/sternenseemann
[go-nix]: https://github.com/nix-community/go-nix
[flokli]: https://flokli.de/
[adisbladis]: https://github.com/adisbladis
