A developer has extended Rewind VM, a deterministic virtual machine that replays Nix builds including thread scheduling, adding a source panel, stack frames, bookmarks, a comparison view, expanded gdb support, thread lanes showing CPU ownership, and a 'Check from here' feature to pinpoint race conditions. The author demonstrates the tool on a classic bank-account race condition, showing deposits lost in 396 of 1,000 runs on a multi-core machine versus none when pinned to a single core.
fzakaria.com
· 2026-10-09
A blog post examines how Nix's dynamic derivations feature fundamentally changes the nature of its build graph, shifting Nix from an 'applicative' system—where every build step is known in advance—to a 'monadic' one, where the graph can be constructed as the build itself progresses. The author revisits earlier writing on the topic after noticing renewed interest, including talks at NixCon 2026 and a new tool called cargo-dyndrv.
fzakaria.com
· 2026-09-21
Developer Frank Zakaria released omniflake, a meta-flake that aggregates thousands of existing Nix flakes behind a single input, letting users pull packages, overlays, or NixOS modules from any of them without manually adding separate flake URLs. The project, hosted at omniflake.com, relies on Nix's lazy evaluation and lock file mechanism to keep the massive dependency list usable, so users only pay the cost of what they actually reference.
fzakaria.com
· 2026-08-30
A developer created SELF (Structured Executable & Linkable Format), a prototype that replaces the traditional ELF executable format with a SQLite database file that can actually be run directly. The project builds on earlier work called sqlelf, which allowed users to query ELF binaries using SQL, and is now available on GitHub.
fzakaria.com
· 2026-08-24
GoKawiil