ehmry/dhall-haskell
ehmry
/
dhall-haskell
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Releases Wiki Activity

Explain use case for `dhall-to-nix` (#913) 

Fixes https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/issues/902
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Gonzalez 2019-04-27 21:10:02 -07:00 committed by GitHub
parent f7fecda09d
commit 44a2750ca0
No known key found for this signature in database
GPG Key ID: 4AEE18F83AFDEB23
1 changed files with 14 additions and 0 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

14
dhall-nix/README.md
View File

@ -14,6 +14,20 @@ This `dhall-nix` package provides a Dhall to Nix compiler. You can use this
compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people
who wish Nix had a type system.
Note that this is a proof-of-concept illustration of how Dhall language
constructs map onto the Nix language. You might get value out of this on small
Nix expressions, but you will likely run into friction using this in a larger
scale with Nixpkgs or NixOS, because Dhall cannot encode many common
Nixpkgs/NixOS idioms, such as:
* general recursion (such as `pkgs.callPackages`, the overlay system, and the
NixOS module system)
* weakly-typed conversions (such as `builtins.listToAttrs`)
* row polymorphism (i.e. the `...` in `{ foo, bar, ... }`)
You can use this project to embed existing Dhall code with Nix, but probably
not as a general-purpose Nix replacement.
## Quick start
If you have Nix installed then you can build and run this package using: