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Some things are much harder in practice than in theory. I recently had to work with a JavaScript project that doesn’t get a lot of maintenance love. It requires

Some things are much harder in practice than in theory. I recently had to work with a JavaScript project that doesn’t get a lot of maintenance love. It requires a JavaScript version that is no longer part of Nixpkgs. Now try figuring out how to build just that version and also make Yarn use that version. It’s not incredibly hard but the documentation is not obvious to find. Then go on a very very long walk while your Darwin machine is now compiling node. Contrast that with something like Volta which just works and takes minutes to setup. Or take anything in Node with a postInstall script that tries to download binaries. Even Haskell that ostensibly has good support in Nix has a lot of flaws unless you use some of the third party Haskell tooling such as Haskell.nix Quite a few Haskell packages are marked as broken and there’s only a single version of every Haskell package in the Nixpkgs Haskell packages. Meaning you will quickly run into lots of errors because of version bound problems. Then there’s matters such a what if you install a formatter and a linter through Nix as is often suggested in those super neat tutorials on how to quickly set up a dev environment. But now you’re using a version of these tools that’s decoupled from the rest of the project. The list goes on and on.

SuperSandro2000 4y ago
You have similar but yet different problems on other distros, too. For example if you want to use a very old node version then you either find a prerecompilation for your distro or also compile it yourself. The precompilation might be linked against an older glibc version or compiling does not work with your distros because your icu version is incompatible and then you are in the same rabbit hole. volta "just works" because it was specifically designed to achieve one defined purpose run on a few platforms and is well tested on those. nix is general and cannot achieve everything. Somewhere maintainers need to cut a line otherwise things get completely out of hand. Network is restricted in the sandbox because otherwise reproducibility would be severely reduced and we could not guarantee that the outputs match what we expect them to be. Also downloaded binaries would usually need patching anyway. Also you are not supposed to take everything from nixpkgs. Like on any other distro if you are developing something the ecosystems own tools are the most well equipped and have all the versions. The versions in nixpkgs are the versions we need for other packages and NixOS, not every possible version you could need to develop a project with specific requirements necessarily. PS: volta did not just work on my NixOS machine because it assumes that relative to glibc there will be a lib directory where it can place things.
JamesSwift 4y ago
> Then go on a very very long walk while your Darwin machine is now compiling node. Yes, if you fall off the happy-path of cached public hydra builds you can easily go from "a few seconds" to "lol maybe today?". Cross-compilation especially is likely to burn you bad in this regard.

SuperSandro2000 4y ago

You have similar but yet different problems on other distros, too. For example if you want to use a very old node version then you either find a prerecompilation for your distro or also compile it yourself. The precompilation might be linked against an older glibc version or compiling does not work with your distros because your icu version is incompatible and then you are in the same rabbit hole. volta "just works" because it was specifically designed to achieve one defined purpose run on a few platforms and is well tested on those. nix is general and cannot achieve everything. Somewhere maintainers need to cut a line otherwise things get completely out of hand. Network is restricted in the sandbox because otherwise reproducibility would be severely reduced and we could not guarantee that the outputs match what we expect them to be. Also downloaded binaries would usually need patching anyway. Also you are not supposed to take everything from nixpkgs. Like on any other distro if you are developing something the ecosystems own tools are the most well equipped and have all the versions. The versions in nixpkgs are the versions we need for other packages and NixOS, not every possible version you could need to develop a project with specific requirements necessarily. PS: volta did not just work on my NixOS machine because it assumes that relative to glibc there will be a lib directory where it can place things.

JamesSwift 4y ago

> Then go on a very very long walk while your Darwin machine is now compiling node. Yes, if you fall off the happy-path of cached public hydra builds you can easily go from "a few seconds" to "lol maybe today?". Cross-compilation especially is likely to burn you bad in this regard.