Parallel Nix Evaluation
The blog post discusses Nix's speed impact on user experience due to Nixpkgs and NixOS growth. Determinate Systems' parallel evaluator boosts performance 3-4 times, addressing immutability challenges for faster evaluations. Ongoing work targets concurrency bugs.
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The blog post discusses the impact of the speed of the Nix expression evaluator on the Nix user experience due to the growth of Nixpkgs and NixOS. It highlights the increasing time taken for operations like listing packages and evaluating configurations. The post introduces a parallel evaluator implemented by Determinate Systems, offering significant performance improvements with speedups of 3-4 times. It explains the inner workings of the Nix evaluator, focusing on the immutability of values and the challenges posed by thunks in achieving parallel evaluation. The post details the approach taken to make the evaluator thread-safe and efficient, including the introduction of new value types and handling of thunks. Results show substantial speedups in evaluation times when using the multi-threaded evaluator. The post concludes by mentioning ongoing work to address concurrency bugs and future plans to expand multi-threading to more Nix subcommands.
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