Have you done something interesting with -- or perhaps working inside of -- Lix, or a similar Nix-like system? Do you have new ideas as to what a Nix interpreter -- or the Nix language -- should do? Has working with Lix given you unique insight on what we should be focusing on in the coming future? We'd love to host your talk, workshop, or discussion!

LixCon 2026 is the conference focused on Lix, a human-friendly and correctness-focus Nix interpreter. We're looking for passionate community members -- both from Lix and related communities -- to share their knowledge, thoughts, experiences in during the first day of our conference.

Submission topics (interest order):

• Lix internals & technical deep dives.
  Dive into Lix’s internals, design choices, and technical challenges -- both current futrure -- or share real-world use cases and case studies.

• Nix-like systems
  Discuss Nix-like systems (e.g. Elpe, zb, Guix, zilch), their design choices and technical challenges. Share how you imagine that a Nix-like system should be.

• Lix usage & real-world insights
  Share your experience using Lix: challenges, improvements, or needs within the Lix core & broader ecosystem surfaced by real-world usage.

• Anything else relevant to Lix interpreter or the Nix language.
  If you've got something you think would be of interest to our audience of Lix and Nix developers, we'd love to hear about it!

Theme topics

Not sure if your idea is of interest to our audience? To help you get an idea of what we're most interested in , we've come up with a (nowhere near) exhaustive list of topics we find particularly intersting. Is your idea not listed here? No sweat -- if you think it's of interest, feel free to run it by us anyway! We're open to hearing your ideas as submissions, or to discussing potential ideas via e-mail at cfp@lix.systems.

• Command-line UX and user interface design
  To date, Lix has been piggy-backing from nix3 and nix2 CLI in order to provide familar interfaces to the Nix ecosystem. If we take a step back, what should the lix4 CLI look like? Can we learn something from Guix CLI? Could we learn something from APT?

• Derivation format concepts
  Lix inherits from the ATerm derivation format. For the time being, Nix interpreters, Guix interpreters, and zb are the only producers of drvs. Discuss whether .drv should be kept or should we start emitting .drv from other pieces of software such as application package managers.

• Store concepts and implementations
  Explore the internals of package stores, from Lix’s inherited approach to store management with a SQLite database to alternative implementations like Snix's CAstore or Ripple.

• The front-end language
  Garbage collector, new evaluation schemes (bytecode VM, optimizing passes applied to the Lix language), concurrent I/O.
  Lix inherits from Nixlang, a peculiar functional programming language with lazy semantics. Not all Nix-like systems decided to keep Nixlang because of various critical problems. Discuss what nix2 could look like or what could be a core language for Nixlang. Compare the approaches with Lisp, Lua or OCaml choices made by other Nix-like systems.

Note for first-time speakers (and to those of underrepresented backgrounds)

Even if you're not an experienced speaker -- or don't have much experience in these kinds of venues -- we'd be thrilled to hear your ideas! We know the submission and talk process can be dauting, whether new to conference talks or to a community -- and accordingly, we'll gladly provide input, direction, and often general affirmation. Reach out via cfp@lix.systems and let us know that we can help!

Submission remarks

• Open discussion talks are welcome but must be specified as such.
• 25-30 minutes talks (incl. 5 minutes of QA) preferred
• Submission deadline: 16th March 2026 at 23:59, anywhere on Earth.

All speakers must agree to the LixCon community standards and AFNix's AI usage policy.

We’re excited to hear your ideas!

You can enter proposals until 2026-03-17 13:59 (Europe/Paris), 1 month, 2 weeks from now.