Announcing Lix 2.96 “Bingsu”

The Lix team is pleased to introduce version 2.96 “Bingsu” of their Nix implementation, Lix. This release emphasizes security enhancements, improved debugger functionality, quality-of-life improvements, and work towards the new Cap’n’Proto RPC protocol and Rust support.

Bingsu, a popular Korean milk-based shaved ice dessert, shares its name with this Lix release. Lix focuses on reliability, predictability, and friendliness in its design, developed by a global community of contributors.

In Lix 2.96, the REPL and debugger have been significantly improved, with better stability, easier navigation, and more readable output. The experimental RPC protocol is now accessible through the rpc-sockets feature, though it is still not fully stable and requires additional system setup.

Several important changes are included in this release. The flake.nix validation has been updated to prohibit function calls outside of outputs, resulting in an error if not explicitly configured otherwise. Additionally, the nix doctor has been expanded to include general system information and remote builder configuration reports, and it can automatically connect to configured remote builders for state checks.

Lix 2.96 also introduces the ssh-ng store URIs, which provide enhanced security features compared to the deprecated ssh:// store URIs. The latter will be removed in Lix 2.97, with ssh-ng:// URIs remaining supported. The floor and ceil builtins now throw errors when precision loss occurs during conversion from floating point to integers.

Many other enhancements and bug fixes have been implemented in this release, such as faster evaluation using mimalloc, improved CI situations, and shadowing internal file errors. The Lix team thanks contributors piegames, Qyriad, and eldritch horrors for their work on this release.