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You contrast Nix with Bazel, and liken it to Docker, tells me you don't have a great grasp of what Nix is. It is far more similar to Bazel than it is to Docker.

You contrast Nix with Bazel, and liken it to Docker, tells me you don't have a great grasp of what Nix is. It is far more similar to Bazel than it is to Docker. > Depend on glibc, copypaste all your other shared lib dependencies and plop them in RPATH. Pretend `/lib` is locked at initial install. Remove `/usr/lib` from the path and include everything. You are not describing relocatable builds at all. You are describing... well, it kinda sounds like how Nix handles RPATH.

forrestthewoods 1y ago
Maybe. Ask 10 devs "what is Nix" and you'll get 15 to 25 responses. Maybe more. Nix is a million different things. There are certainly things within Nix that I like. But on the whole I think it's approximately two orders of magnitude more complicated than is necessary to efficiently build and deploy software.
- hamandcheese 1y ago
  Nix is 4 or 5 different things. I agree that the term is unfortunately quite overloaded. > But on the whole I think it's approximately two orders of magnitude more complicated than is necessary to efficiently build and deploy software. This might be true, if you dramatically constrain the problem space to something like "only build and deploy static Go binaries". If you have that luxury, by all means, simplify your life! But in the general case, it is an inherently complex problem space, and tools that attempt to rise to the challenge, like Bazel or Nix, will be lot more complex than a Dockerfile.
  - forrestthewoods 1y ago
    My core hypothesis - which is maybe wrong - is that a good Bazel-like doesn't have to be that complex. I use Buck2 in my day job. For almost all projects its an order of magnitude simpler than CMake. It's got a ton of cruft to support a decades worth of targets that were made badly made. But the overall shape is actually pretty darn good. I think Starlark (and NixLang) are huge mistakes. Thou shalt not mix data and logic. Thou shalt not ever ever ever force users to use a language that doesn't have a great debugger. Build systems aren't actually that complicated. It's usually super duper trivial for me to write down the EXACT command I want to execute. It's "just" a matter of inducing a wobbly rube goldberg machine that can't be debugged to invoke the god damn command I know I want. Grumble grumble.
    - oxryly1 1y ago
      Sounds like you want https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/redo/ https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/redo/

forrestthewoods 1y ago

Maybe. Ask 10 devs "what is Nix" and you'll get 15 to 25 responses. Maybe more. Nix is a million different things. There are certainly things within Nix that I like. But on the whole I think it's approximately two orders of magnitude more complicated than is necessary to efficiently build and deploy software.

hamandcheese 1y ago
Nix is 4 or 5 different things. I agree that the term is unfortunately quite overloaded. > But on the whole I think it's approximately two orders of magnitude more complicated than is necessary to efficiently build and deploy software. This might be true, if you dramatically constrain the problem space to something like "only build and deploy static Go binaries". If you have that luxury, by all means, simplify your life! But in the general case, it is an inherently complex problem space, and tools that attempt to rise to the challenge, like Bazel or Nix, will be lot more complex than a Dockerfile.
- forrestthewoods 1y ago
  My core hypothesis - which is maybe wrong - is that a good Bazel-like doesn't have to be that complex. I use Buck2 in my day job. For almost all projects its an order of magnitude simpler than CMake. It's got a ton of cruft to support a decades worth of targets that were made badly made. But the overall shape is actually pretty darn good. I think Starlark (and NixLang) are huge mistakes. Thou shalt not mix data and logic. Thou shalt not ever ever ever force users to use a language that doesn't have a great debugger. Build systems aren't actually that complicated. It's usually super duper trivial for me to write down the EXACT command I want to execute. It's "just" a matter of inducing a wobbly rube goldberg machine that can't be debugged to invoke the god damn command I know I want. Grumble grumble.
  - oxryly1 1y ago
    Sounds like you want https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/redo/ https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/redo/