Nix as a Mario Emulator: Infinite Attribute Trees and 20,000-Button Runs

Super Mario Derivations

The Nix language's laziness lets attribute sets contain themselves, enabling infinite recursion. This blog post explores that by turning attribute paths into button sequences for Super Mario Bros. 3, where each press is a derivation. The result: a store that acts as a savestate history, with branching costing almost nothing. The author pushes limits, reaching 20,000 presses before hitting OS argument limits, and shows how the store becomes a reproducible state-machine.