Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Olivier Dion via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System
distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> skribis:

> On another note, what I find fascinating is why Guix and Nix are not
> more used in academic papers.  A quick search on the Compendex database
> gives me only a handful of papers referencing Guix, mostly all from
> Ludovic.  I simply can't understand this.  You have a way to factor out
> the toolchain from the equation of your research's resuls -- making it
> trivial to reproduce -- and yet every papers that I read is using some
> Ubuntu LTS or Fedora as their build and testing environment.

This is what we’re pushing as part of the Guix-HPC effort¹.  Ricardo’s
research team, for instance, has published bioinfo papers that build on
Guix for reproducibility.  Colleagues of mine in HPC (linear algebra and
run-time systems) are also starting to do this.

That’s still very much niche, but there’s growing awareness of how tools
like Guix can help build reproducible research workflows.  The next thing
for us is to provide tools and documents to make it more approachable.

Ludo’.

¹ https://hpc.guix.info