pat42smith

Installing NixOS on Apple silicon without using an external USB drive

I'd like to call this a guide to installing NixOS on Apple silicon Macintosh computers. More accurately, it is a record of my experience in doing such an installation. YMMV

All of the hard work has been done by others; see the references below. However, the method described in UEFI Boot Standalone NixOS requires booting a USB drive, which seems to require a keyboard that works under U-Boot - and none of my 3 keyboards do!

So instead of a USB drive, I use another Linux distribution installed on the same computer. NixOS will end up installed beside this other distribution. In this guide, I assume the other distribution is Fedora.

This guide was written in mid-summer 2024. Even while I was writing it, there were changes in the details of what I needed to do. So things may have changed since then; be

pat42smith

Go Generics with Adaptors

Contracts — Draft Design presents a draft proposal for adding generic types and functions to the Go programming language, using contracts to specify the behavior required of type parameters.

This document discusses two topics.

First, suppose generic types and functions are added to Go as in the contracts proposal, but without contracts. When a generic function f has a type parameter T, the only operations f can perform on values of type T are the operations that are available on all types. Is there a reasonable way to write generic code in these circumstances, with no other additions to the language? The answer seems to be

• Yes, this is quite doable.
• And it works well with both built-in and user-defined types.

pat42smith

Go generics for built-in and user-defined type parameters

Contracts — Draft Design presents a draft proposal for adding generic types and functions to the Go programming language, using contracts to specify the behavior required of type parameters.

The current document sketches a simple extension to that proposal, which would permit writing generic functions whose type parameters could be either built-in types or user-defined types deliberately designed to be similar to the built-in types.

Background

Consider a generic function, say