I’ve been hopping around Gentoo and Void the past few days with musl on both, and I’ll be going back to NixOS in a bit due to not having enough time to set up either of them. I’ve realised how little RAM either systems use on musl, though, and I was wondering if there is any chance of replacing glibc with musl on NixOS?

  •  hallettj   ( @hallettj@beehaw.org ) 
    3•11 months ago

    Nixpkgs includes packages compiled for musl under the pkgsMusl prefix. For example, pkgs.pkgsMusl.hello. IIUC these only exist on a Linux system.

    Maybe you can use those packages for everything by setting pkgsMusl as your package set. For example if you are using Home Manager with a flake config you normally have a line like,

    let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};

    Maybe you could change that to

    let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}.pkgsMusl;
    •  ck_   ( @ck_@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
      7•11 months ago

      This technically exists but practically #musl is a third class citizen on #NixOS. They don’t run a hydra test set for package builds so core packages break all the time, dragging down the whole system. Until there is an actual musl community forming in the NixOS space, I doubt anyone will have a good time using it for a complex system build. Also keep in mind that there is no binary cache for musl builds (as far as I know), so if a core package gets an update, there goes your weekend. Due to the concepts of #Nix you basically run an emerge --empty-tree on a regular basis.