Nix wrote half of my debugger
A developer built Rewind VM, a deterministic VM that turns every Nix build into a pure function of its inputs, including thread scheduling. Using it to hunt race conditions, he discovered that Nix already provides the hardest parts of a debugger: exact inputs, debug symbols, and sources. The tool now offers source panels, stack frames, gdb support, thread lanes, and a 'Check from here' feature to pinpoint race conditions.
I went into each new feature thinking it would be a big code-lift but I kept running into the same thing: the hard part of each feature was already done, and Nix had done it.
- pmarreck
There is likely a mass of devs that is probably, hmmm, 10x the number of Nix devs from over a year ago, who know exactly what Nix offers and why it is cool, but couldn't be bothered to master it until AI came along and basically "solved the problem".
So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.
- tecoholic
Seeing Nix these days is such a whiplash experience. We have fully deterministic systems and then we have LLMs. God ;)
- saagarjha
I kind of confused what nix has to do with this considering it seems to basically be reimplementing rr?
- __MatrixMan__
I find myself moving more and more non-build things into nix builds because I don't want to roll my own cache invalidation. Seems like this is yet another reason to do so.
- Cyph0n
Dude, this is amazing stuff. Farid really is putting out banger after Nix banger haha. This sounds like a mini/less capable Antithesis runtime, but running on your machine.
Curious: how does Rewind deal with randomness?