NixOS: The Purely Functional Linux Distribution

Spreker: Eelco Dolstra

Abstract

NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management: it builds packages and configurations from descriptions in a declarative, purely functional language, and stores the resulting files as purely functional data structures. This leads to some very nice properties compared to other distributions: NixOS systems can be upgraded and rolled back in a transactional way; multiple versions of packages coexist without interfering with each other; and system configurations can be reproduced deterministically from their specifications. These properties make NixOS very useful for DevOps use.

Biografie

Eelco Dolstra is a computer scientist at LogicBlox and one of the main contributors to the NixOS project. He received his PhD degree at Utrecht University in 2006 and was a postdoc at Utrecht University and Delft University of Technology.