Dear Nix community, I’m excited to announce the first release of Nickel! You can read the announcement blog post for a quick recap of the current capabilities, and to learn about what’s in and what’s coming next.
For this release, we have focused on designing the core language more than anything else. While it is not intended to be used in production yet, we hope to collect feedback and experience to help steer the future of the language in the right direction.
Using Nickel for Nix is, for the moment, quite limited. However, now that the 0.1.0 milestone has passed, this is very much our main focus for the near future: find a robust and ergonomic way of using Nickel as an alternative to write shells, packages, and modules, without disturbing the Nix ecosystem. We’ve already been thinking about it on and off for quite some time, and it poses particular challenges, such as how to leverage the existing Nix ecosystem without being drawn into the same issues we were trying to improve on in the first place.
In the meantime, @garbas , @regnat and I have been fiddling on the side with a hacky direct way to write simple derivations in Nickel: you can find our current lab at nickel-lang.
Let me conclude by quoting the blog post itself:
We are seeking for feedbacks, ideas and opinions. Yours are invaluable: please use Nickel, break it, do cool things we haven’t even imagined, and most importantly, please let us know about it!