And when it happens, that there are new Nix features used in Nixpkgs, then you can download the closure for the new Nix executable, directly from the build farm, and update your OS from this new Nix version.
"attribute grammar" and "novel" in the same statement? Whoa! I tried to publish a paper ~15 years ago on attribute grammars … without success and non-constructive review feedback. I am not aware of any company making use of attribute grammars in production. I had the goal of making use of attribute grammars as part of https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/jsparagus (SmooshMonkey), but making a JavaScript parser generator which is as efficient as our hand-written parser is already surprisingly difficult, and the COVID ended the project.
On the topic of finding a job … I would be of no help. The only internships/jobs I found so far were all outside the usual applications forms:
* By emailing to the author of an R&D language that I was already using, asking if they could make a position for me in their lab.
* From a teacher recommending me in the start-up where he worked for building an interpreted language.
* By going to one of the Firefox 4 party, and giving a visit card after seeing a presentation about SpiderMonkey.
This presentation describes the high-level principles of Just-In-Time compilers.
It was made for the GlobalScope '21 (a JavaScript online conference) and contains the transcript.
This was used as a prompter while recording this talk, and can be synchronized using web-sockets, when served locally.
Nix can do that, you can easily use nix-env to create a new profile instead of using the default one stored in ~/.nix-profile . I am using multiple tool-chains stored in multiple profiles for my development process.