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Does this work on Windows? For me, the version manager that provides the nicest experience cross-platform is Cargo from Rust. It can specify and pin specific

Does this work on Windows? For me, the version manager that provides the nicest experience cross-platform is Cargo from Rust. It can specify and pin specific versions. It is super easy to give to a fellow developer and have them reproduce the build. In addition, because Rust is suitable for low-level, high performance work, many times all the libraries you actually need are written in Rust and everything works very seemlessly (for example, there is no need to have libxml like the Ruby xml library needed, because you can probably write an XML parser in Rust that will be on par or better performance wise with libxml).

aidenn0 5y ago
Nix is very unixy so it probably could be made to work on WSL, but not native windows. Yes, if all of your dependencies are written in a single language, you can use the language-specific version manager. TFA was pointing out a solution that work across different languages.
- swsieber 5y ago
  It would be very nice to have a cross language and cross platform package manager. Most single language package managers are cross platform, and many single platform managers are cross language.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    It might be possible to port it to msys/mingw
  - tempay 5y ago
    Conda manages this pretty well and the community ran “conda-forge” channel works. It’s language, platform and architecture agnostic. It only supports distributing binaries which can be a benefit or downside when compared to Nix’s “build the world with caching” approach depending on your needs. Personally I find conda’s approach to be more pragmatic for working with unprivileged systems and how packages expect to be used. Though I do hop the Nix-store like model continues to grow in popularity as it’s much better than the classic posix install layout. In conda, packages are installed into “environments” which are just folders like Python’s venv except language agnostic so you can install specific OpenSSL/Clang/GCC/libWhatever versions and have one environment per project you work on. It’s also the only package manager I’m aware of that can provide a good experience across Windows/Linux/macOS for x86_64/arm64/ppc64le. One issue with conda is that the ecosystem of tooling is a little fragmented. The classic “conda” package has performance issues but there is a second implementation “mamba” which fixes this at the cost of minor changes in behaviour and attempts to merge mamba into conda seem to have stalled. If you want to try it out Id recommend using the “Mambaforge” distribution and using “mamba” for everything except “conda activate” (which is actually a shell function).
- danieldk 5y ago
  Single user Nix works out of the box without issues on WSL.
- takeda 5y ago
  It works on WSL but works better on WSL2. WSL is missing some linux functionality like locking this causes sqlite3 to potentially corrupt the data.

aidenn0 5y ago

Nix is very unixy so it probably could be made to work on WSL, but not native windows. Yes, if all of your dependencies are written in a single language, you can use the language-specific version manager. TFA was pointing out a solution that work across different languages.

swsieber 5y ago
It would be very nice to have a cross language and cross platform package manager. Most single language package managers are cross platform, and many single platform managers are cross language.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  It might be possible to port it to msys/mingw
- tempay 5y ago
  Conda manages this pretty well and the community ran “conda-forge” channel works. It’s language, platform and architecture agnostic. It only supports distributing binaries which can be a benefit or downside when compared to Nix’s “build the world with caching” approach depending on your needs. Personally I find conda’s approach to be more pragmatic for working with unprivileged systems and how packages expect to be used. Though I do hop the Nix-store like model continues to grow in popularity as it’s much better than the classic posix install layout. In conda, packages are installed into “environments” which are just folders like Python’s venv except language agnostic so you can install specific OpenSSL/Clang/GCC/libWhatever versions and have one environment per project you work on. It’s also the only package manager I’m aware of that can provide a good experience across Windows/Linux/macOS for x86_64/arm64/ppc64le. One issue with conda is that the ecosystem of tooling is a little fragmented. The classic “conda” package has performance issues but there is a second implementation “mamba” which fixes this at the cost of minor changes in behaviour and attempts to merge mamba into conda seem to have stalled. If you want to try it out Id recommend using the “Mambaforge” distribution and using “mamba” for everything except “conda activate” (which is actually a shell function).
danieldk 5y ago
Single user Nix works out of the box without issues on WSL.
takeda 5y ago
It works on WSL but works better on WSL2. WSL is missing some linux functionality like locking this causes sqlite3 to potentially corrupt the data.