There is a lot to unpack here — first of all, Nix and Docker are not at all competitors. Docker doesn’t even try to be reproducible, most builds will just apt i

There is a lot to unpack here — first of all, Nix and Docker are not at all competitors. Docker doesn’t even try to be reproducible, most builds will just apt install the newest available version that could easily change between invocations. Next, Cargo is not a solution: it can only do a tiny part of the problem, namely managing Rust dependencies for a Rust project. What if you are building a tool that needs a shared lib to communicate with.. basically anything? Rust has an enthusiastic community, but it is still a tiny language — most problems require more than what can be found in any one language’s berks. Also, what even is a version? 3.4 of package X doesn’t mean anything — if it has like 10 flags than it can be built 2^10 different ways, and then we didn’t even count its dependencies that are also not just a number. Nix does the correct thing, not the naive one.