Nix on macOS, nixpkgs for darwin, nix-darwin with Randy Eckenrode

Pre-roll transcript:

Before you is an episode of the Full Time Nix podcast

For silence skipping and other useful features consider using a podcast app

---

https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

https://brew.sh/

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_list

https://repology.org/repository/nix_unstable

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/unstable/#chap-stdenv

https://libcxx.llvm.org/ReleaseNotes/19.html#deprecations-and-removals

Tracking issue for Darwin stdenv LLVM update:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/234710

I’d also credit reno and emilazy for driving the LLVM 19 upgrade. They used a few patches from a WIP Clang 18 branch I’d started over the summer, but they pushed the update over the finish line once breaking changes were allowed after the 24.11 release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder

https://developer.apple.com/metal/

https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

https://github.com/facebookarchive/xcbuild

https://ghostty.org/

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/unstable/#deploying-a-proxy-component-wrapper-exposing-xcode

MacVim in nixpkgs:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/50784a2835c150d6055861a5ad703a57b8070cbb/pkgs/applications/editors/vim/macvim.nix

https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/teams/darwin-core
https://github.com/reckenrode
https://github.com/emilazy
https://github.com/toonn

PR establishing the Darwin team:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/348183

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corefoundation

when Apple implemented this hardening, before it just happened to work. So, and this actually affected Nix because Nix uses the AWS C++ SDK and that stopped building
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/265102

macOS 15 Sequoia clobbers _nixbld1-4 users:
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/10892

https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

https://fishshell.com/

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

Fixing waifu2x-converter-cpp on Darwin:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/135725

Though it turns out my actually first nixpkgs PR was fixing vscode-lldb on Darwin:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/131324

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Last year, Connor Baker created a draft PR to add the missing SDK.
Connor Baker’s draft PR adding more SDKs:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/229210

https://www.vulkan.org/

Darwin SDK PR (has links to my PRs fixing issues):
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/346043

Discourse post with the SDK update announcement:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-darwin-sdks-have-been-updated/55295

Here’s that list (by GitHub id). These people were all very helpful with ensuring these Darwin improvements made it to master.staging-next with the clang 16 update (tried to get everyone who contributed during that cycle; appologies if I missed anyone):

• Atemu
• anthonyroussel
• azuwis
• boltzmannrain
• emilytrau
• josephst
• judofyr
• mfrischknech
• philiptaron
• toonn
• trofi
• wegank

Darwin SDK update. It turns out that in spite of radically changing the pattern, providing an SDK by default tends to just work.

• emilazy
• khaneliman
• paparodeo
• toonn

I also want to thank midchildan for contributing fixes to xcbuild to address some of the post-release issues users have encountered with having it in a dev shell by default. I also wanted to call out the great work getting Zed and Firefox building on Darwin with these SDK changes:

• niklaskorz (for Zed)
• booxter (for Firefox)

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/dyld

Note that the source for ld-prime is actually removed from the distribution. I’d package it if it were there, but it’s not.

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

Another call for Darwin maintainers:
htt...