February 26, 2016
The ldc D compiler has been added to GNU Guix and used to compile and
deploy rdmd and sambamba tools, for example:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/

GNU Guix is a package manager for the Gnu/Linux operating system. Guix
is unlike other package managers because is allows for isolated builds
and complete control over the dependency graph (all the way down to
glibc). For developers this means that (1) Guix is a rolling
distribution (work with the latest tools AND earlier versions) and (2)
that all deployments are fully reproducible. This is the holy grail
for both large deployments on one end of the spectrum and developers
wishing to have users reproduce the exact same runtime environments on
the other end.

GNU Guix binary packages can effectively already run on any Linux
distribution (x86_64, i686, armhf, mips64) including Debian, Ubuntu,
CentOS and often older versions too because all Guix deployments are
stored in /gnu/store and are independent of the underlying
distribution.

The easiest way to try GNU Guix is to download the binary tarball
and follow the instructions on

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/download/
  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Binary-Installation.html

essentially unpack the tarball into /gnu. Add build-users (one for
each CPU) and a build group. Guix builds software as a daemon in
isolation, so builders can not 'just' install software. Next start the
guix-daemon and install the key for accessing the binary
distribution. Finally make guix available in your PATH. In the
unlikely event you want to get rid of GNU Guix, removing the software
is as easy as 'rm -rf /gnu/store'.

Some interesting reading is

  Reproducible and User-Controlled Software Environments in HPC with
Guix
  https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01161771/document

There were many talks on Guix at FOSDEM 2016. With accompanying slides
and video. I especially recommend

  https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/deployments_with_gnu_guix/
  https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/guixdistro/
  https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/speaker/ricardo_wurmus/
  https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/guixmodules/