I wasn’t sure where exactly to put this. On a mailinglist I would’ve just mailed it to the best ‘advisory’ related list. Move it if Q/H is not fitting.

Hi,

a couple years back I started out on the purely functional operating systems path. During my years of contributions to Guix and GuixSD I started designing a different approach. Guix is mostly Guile (Scheme) based with some (fading) remains of Nix daemon code.
It took a while (longer than I initially hoped for) to gather first hand, practical expertise about these OS and their managers (they manage more than just packages). So pretty close to releasing a first demo of plant (and infotropique OS), I have started an evaluation of Nix(OS) and Guix(SD). Their implementations and so on. Let’s say that the people I work with, including myself, would like to have a final check if there’s a better suited language than Guile.

I’m not looking at just Erlang and Elixir alone, but since I’m new to both languages there’s a certain appeal in them. I’m not sure if people are familiar with these (relatively) new Operating Systems (albeit ‘functional OS’ is not a completely new research field): https://grosskurth.ca/bib/2006/dolstra-thesis.pdf.

Finances play (almost) no role, but: is the idea of implementing the relevant parts of the thesis in Elixir an impossible act and it’s just my gut feeling playing tricks on me by making Elixir look like a tempting language?

I am biased by how it is all stitched together in Guix. My work so far outside of it is stripping it down into the smallest parts possible with a future focus on a modular OS building framework (with many extras). Obviously there are times when Elixir and the BEAM are not the best tools for the job. Other than gaining experience through reading and discussions with more experienced Elixir programmers, how do you figure out if Elixir is “right” or “wrong” before you can fully grasp the ways you’d need to rewrite (or start from scratch) your application/OS without sacrificing its core ideals and functionalities?
I just have ideas and experience outside of Elixir and Erlang, so I hope these rather general questions are not too early (I will probably have a document to point to in a couple months), too open.

For the casual by-passers who might be familiar with my name: this is mostly a theoretical question - my work, no matter how the evaluation ends up, is with an emphasis on collaboration and sharing of ideas, and extending ideas.