Racket on NixOS
As you might have noticed, I'm about to switch to NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution ™. Here are some toughts on Racket on NixOS.
First, why Racket? Well, my blog here is written using frog, the frozen blog
tool which is written in Racket . It
actually works really well for me and was not that much effort to setup – I'd
recommend it to everyone.
But this isn't about frog, this is about racket. So, I need Racket for my blog. But I also like Racket, I played with it some time ago and it is a neat language, really!
Because of my switch to NixOS I wanted to try whether I can compile my blog on NixOS, so I installed Racket on my NixOS-testing machine. And you know what is awesome?
It. Just. Worked.
When installing racket, the racket language distribution ships everything you
need. It ships the racket interpreter, it ships DrRacket, the Racket-IDE, the
REPL, the package manager for racket. I was able to install frog and compile
my blog in 3 steps.
- Install racket
- Install frog using the racket package manager
- Compile the blog
Well, you actually do not use the nix package manager when doing the upper steps, which is, of course, impure. But I wanted to focus on whether it works or not here, not on purity. Of course it would be much better to be able to install frog via the nix package manager, keeping everything in the nix store. But that's not possible (yet), I guess. tags: #linux #nixos #nix #blog