Agreed. When I started getting involved with Nix stuff almost half a decade ago, I already heard friends complaining about the development of Nix. I can distinguish two generations of contributors burnt out on Nix even before the Lix folks. Given that history, the lack of communication from the Lix folks is anything but surprising. To me, this situation is as a very clear case of “too little, too late”.
I think that dwelling in the past about how or why exactly things have happened the way they have is not constructive. But also, as others have noted, forks are not necessarily a bad thing, and while this likely was avoidable I don’t think that we currently are in the worst possible timeline right now. So let’s rather focus on how to proceed constructively from where we are now.
I’ve been daily driving Lix for a while now. It’s nice.
Seems a bit snappier than NixCpp and there are some tweaks to the user experience that make working with it better, like nix eval nixpkgs#python3 showing «derivation /nix/store/9v1jlbifgwgfw0l9v745kifpj9zdpl60-python3-3.11.9.drv» instead of crashing.
Nix 2.22 handles this just fine. You might have still been running Nix 2.18 or something, since that’s the current default in Nixpkgs. (I don’t know whether the fix originated with the Lix people and was backported, or whether it originated with the Nix people and was merged in, or whether they both arrived at a fix independently or whatever.)