Nominate @llakala

[philiptaron]

I'd like to nominate @llakala (Eman Resu, "user name" backwards) for a nixpkgs commit bit.

Over the last six months, I've watched llakala become one of the most dedicated stewards of lib and stdenv evaluation performance. She has run a sustained, systematic campaign to make nixpkgs evaluation faster, and to make better use of the memory and CPU resources available. This is incremental, careful, painstaking work: hundreds of careful, well-scoped commits that shave allocations and function calls out of the hottest code paths with no regressions to functionality.

Here's a representative sample:

• lib.lists: performance improvements (#522834) where she rewrote take, drop, init, flatten, foldl', toposort and friends to avoid unnecessary sublist calls, subtractions, and builtins lookups.
• lib: remove assertMsg, throwIf, and throwIfNot usage (#524523) where she removed eagerly-evaluated assertion overhead treewide.
• lib.strings: small performance cleanups (#519085) and lib.sources: small performance improvements (#536129).
• ci/eval: add opt-in instruction counting using perf (#538429), where she's starting to build the measurement infrastructure so these wins are verified with reproducible numbers rather than the extremely fuzzy "CPU time" metric. This was the PR where I thought: I should nominate her.

Each change is individually small, but collectively they make every nix evaluation across the entire ecosystem cheaper. It demands a deep understanding of the evaluator's cost model and meticulous care to preserve semantics.

Just as important is her sense of ownership. She reviews actively in these areas and keeps the quality bar high, while treating the people who propose changes with dignity and respect.

Thought the total set of commits and reviews are smaller than most we grant the commit bit to, I've seen enough to believe that she'll do good -- and be unblocked and be an unblocker -- with a commit bit. I'd like to see what further good she'll be able to do by hitting merge on the PRs that she reviews.

• Merged PRs (78)
• Reviewed/commented (95)

[pyrox0]

Having seen her work over the past several months, cannot agree more that she is well deserving of the commit bit. Always good to see someone working on nixpkgs evaluation time, and she has done an incredible job!

[GraysonTinker]

I've been exceedingly impressed by everything I've seen from her since she started contributing. In no time at all she has proven herself to be incredibly knowledgeable with Nix, and I admire her work in constantly evaluating PRs for their performance implications.

[MattSturgeon]

🚀

[llakala]

It's an honor, thank you! I just took some time to set up commit signing and Bitwarden - I'd love to avoid being the cause of a security vulnerability.

Happy to accept this and hopefully unblock some other people's work.

[infinisil]

Very much in favor!