The Shepherd on TV!

The FOSDEM + Guix Days combo usually makes for an intense and exhaustive week, and this year’s edition was no exception! The Declarative & Minimalistic Computing track was home to a wealth of exciting talks, many of which about all things Guile—the Whippet garbage collector, the RDE Guix derivative, the Goblins distributed programming framework, and… not one but two talks about the Shepherd!

The first talk, by yours, truly, shows what the Shepherd is about and how it works under the hood: concurrent sequential processes with Fibers, the pleasure of writing callback-free and race-free concurrent code, of running a real-eval-print loop (REPL) in a live program (we told ya: the coolest init system to hack on!), but also, well, challenges that come with it. Here’s the video. 👇… and the slides.

The second talk by Spritely developer Juliana Sims depicted the vision for what could become the next Shepherd, ported to Spritely Goblins with the promise of bringing a higher-level programming environment and also distributed and secure interactions with the Shepherd—the beginning of the plan9ification of Guix!

And because the Shepherd is such an active project, we’re happy to announce today version 1.0.2 as the second bug-fix release in the 1.0 stable series. Check out the news!