(author here) The mutation is only for performance critical code. I'm first trying to match C/Rust performance in my code, and then transform it to more idiomatic functional code (which flambda2 in OxCaml can optimise).
It's too difficult right now to directly jump to the functional version since I don't understand the flambda2 compiler well enough to predict whta optimisations will work! OxCaml is stabilising more this year so that should get easier in time.
Articles like this one might encourage me to give it another go. Is there a distribution that's considered the 'best' for a KDE environment or will any do?
I don't know if there is a "best" but I've been using OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 with KDE on my work, personal, and family machines for the last year or so. Even my non-technical (but technologically capable) spouse has been using and enjoying it over that time on their personal laptop.
For me the best KDE software integration is in openSUSE, also love their YaST graphical control center and BTRFS filesystem snappshoting integration with the package manager and the control center. Second best distro for me is Fedora KDE.
I remember seeing tons of mockups for how KDE 4 should look like. One was absolutely stunning but I can’t find it anymore. I remember a mostly flat theme with the idea that an app’s settings could be on the backside of a window. The dock was also brilliantly made.
Oh gosh I wish I could find those old designs again. Unfortunately they didn’t go for it and went with tons of silvery gradients instead.
I don't think he touched on whether server side is a more valid use case, but was nice to read someone elses take on using it for a desktop. Thanks for the contribution.
He did find functional programming to be sort of mystic so I don't know if I trust his take on assesing the nix language itself.
TLDR; just stick with ubuntu or arch unless you feel like experimenting
Author here. Your TLDR is spot on. Yes, my intent was to be on desktop use since most things I read dont consider that specifically.
I did talk about how I would keep this running on some simple home servers since I think that's where Nix shines. But some of my servers are raspberry pis, which I mentioned I am worried to run Nix on due to resource limitations. I should probably just try it.
I'm running NixOS on a raspberry pi and I deploy to it with deploy-rs¹. This works pretty well for me. My dev machine is an Apple Silicon laptop with nix-darwin installed and I use its nix.linux-builder module to run an aarch64-linux VM as a remote builder to build the rpi's system. All this means the rpi never has to do any building itself, and doesn't even need the nixpkgs source installed either.
If you want to do this yourself, I recommend using https://github.com/nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix so the system is configured much more closely to how the stock raspberry pi image works. The benefit of this is better reliability of stuff like bluetooth.
It might be technically true, but I don't think it would be true in practice. The difference is that:
- Technically true means you will probably win any lawsuit they bring
- In practice means that they will in fact bring a lot of lawsuits, making it very expensive for you and difficult for you to operate. They will probably find excuses to harass you over every little thing, they will harass you over lots of details that are technically required but rarely enforced in practice. You'll constantly be getting inspected and audited, they will bring lawsuits for other, apparently unrelated things.
What, to you, is an ultra strong type system? Both OCaml and Haskell are used in plenty of non academic contexts. Do you mean something like Coq or F*?
I don't see many GAFAM products created in any functional language, even those with primitive type systems. Are you sure it is the type system that is scaring people away?
Oh that's a solved problem since 1969. It's called "unix". Everything is a file which can be processed as a byte stream. Composition is a breeze- can't be any more general than that!
An actual Lisp programmer will tell you that the right thing depends on the situation. The right thing can be a lambda, a string, a symbol, a structure, a class object, a hash table, a vector, a list, a call to a foreign function, a syntactic abstraction, a bitmask, a load-time value, a pattern matcher, ...
