Release 0.16 (2010-08-17)
This release has the following improvements:
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The Nix expression evaluator is now much faster in most cases: typically, 3 to 8 times compared to the old implementation. It also uses less memory. It no longer depends on the ATerm library.
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Support for configurable parallelism inside builders. Build scripts have always had the ability to perform multiple build actions in parallel (for instance, by running
make -j 2), but this was not desirable because the number of actions to be performed in parallel was not configurable. Nix now has an option--cores Nas well as a configuration settingbuild-cores = Nthat causes the environment variableNIX_BUILD_CORESto be set to N when the builder is invoked. The builder can use this at its discretion to perform a parallel build, e.g., by callingmake -j N. In Nixpkgs, this can be enabled on a per-package basis by setting the derivation attributeenableParallelBuildingtotrue. -
nix-store -qnow supports XML output through the--xmlflag. -
Several bug fixes.