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docs(web/tvl): rewrite blog post to be more "milestoney"

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Suggested by zimbatm.

Change-Id: I5979cf820943dd44c8a759f226b340c37f9b0446
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/6572
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: eta <tvl@eta.st>
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Vincent Ambo 2022-09-13 18:35:51 +03:00 committed by tazjin
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commit e5a9581682
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47
web/tvl/blog/tvix-status-202209.md
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@ -28,24 +28,10 @@ and [sterni][].
### So, what's working now?
The answer is *most things*! However, there are some unfinished and
important feature areas:
The answer is *most things*! You can enter many Nix language
expressions in [Tvixbolt][] and observe how they are evaluated.
1. The majority of Nix's `builtins` are not yet implemented (including
fundamental ones such as `import` and `derivation`).
2. Recursive attribute sets (`rec`) are not yet implemented. This is
actually not because of the recursion in itself, but because of the
handling of nested keys (such as `a.b`), for which we are designing
a more efficient solution than what is currently in place.
In both cases we have mostly figured out how to do the remaining work
and it is simply a question of time until we've done it. Progress is
steady and can of course be tracked [in the source][src] (viewer
without Javascript [here][src-noscript]).
At the same time, we've already implemented some basics that are
hopefully going to have a huge impact further down, such as:
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on under-the-hood, notably:
* The Tvix compiler is built to be able to emit warnings & errors
without failing early, as well as retaining as much source
@ -66,7 +52,13 @@ hopefully going to have a huge impact further down, such as:
differently based on whether it is empty, a `name/value` pair or a
larger set.
### How does this all work?
We've also (constrained by the available features) run some initial
benchmarks against C++ Nix, and in most cases Tvix evaluation is an
order of magnitude faster. However, these benchmarks are in no way
indicative of real-life performance when evaluating something like
`nixpkgs` yet, so stay tuned for more information on performance.
### How does it all work?
Tvix's evaluator is implemented using a custom abstract machine with a
very Nix-specific instruction set, as well as a compiler that
@ -89,8 +81,23 @@ towards).
### What's next for tvix-eval?
Apart from the missing language features outlined above, the next
steps are:
Despite everything, there are some unfinished and important feature
areas:
1. The majority of Nix's `builtins` are not yet implemented (including
fundamental ones such as `import` and `derivation`).
2. Recursive attribute sets (`rec`) are not yet implemented. This is
actually not because of the recursion in itself, but because of the
handling of nested keys (such as `a.b`), for which we are designing
a more efficient solution than what is currently in place.
In both cases we have mostly figured out how to do the remaining work
and it is simply a question of time until we've done it. Progress is
steady and can of course be tracked [in the source][src] (viewer
without Javascript [here][src-noscript]).
Apart from that, the next steps are:
* Comprehensive benchmarking. We are standing up an infrastructure for
continuous benchmarking to measure the impact of changes, and to be