GNU Guix launches

Guix & Nix
~~~~~~~~~~

Nix is really two things: a package build tool, implemented by a library
and daemon, and a special-purpose programming language. Guix relies on
the former, but uses Scheme as a replacement for the latter.

Technically, Guix makes remote procedure calls to the ‘nix-worker’
daemon to perform operations on the store. At the lowest level, Nix
“derivations” represent promises of a build, stored in ‘.drv’ files in
the store. Guix produces such derivations, which are then interpreted
by the daemon to perform the build. Thus, Guix derivations can use
derivations produced by Nix (and vice versa); in Guix, the cheat code is
the ‘nixpkgs-derivation’ procedure. :-)

With Nix and the Nixpkgs distribution, package composition happens at
the Nix language level, but builders are usually written in Bash.
Conversely, Guix encourages the use of Scheme for both package
composition and builders.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2012-07/msg0...