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Comment by speedkills | Hacker News Reader

Installed emacs with nix last weekend to use with spacemacs. Three errors at startup that didn't make sense but I had a feeling that nix was the problem so rolled back and reinstalled with brew. Worked perfectly. Nix has some great ideas but when the install of emacs took 10 times as long as homebrew, then didn't work correctly it didn't leave me wanting to use it for anything work related like my docker images.

Hopefully with time, their planned cli improvements and binary caching it will be a contender but that feels a ways off at this point.

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> Nix has some great ideas but when the install of emacs took 10 times as long as homebrew, then didn't work correctly it didn't leave me wanting to use it for anything work related like my docker images.

I understand it's not fun to watch a long build process finish only to have the final product not work, but that assessment is not really fair. Nix itself is not the problem there; the problem is in the definition of that package. The same thing could just as easily occur in a package defined in homebrew. Saying that nix itself is at fault when an individual package (among hundreds of thousands) is faulty is sort of akin to encountering a buggy program and equating it to a bug in the language the program was written in.

I'd also add that due to the closed-source nature of OSX core libraries, it's hard to achieve the same degree of robust determinism in OSX that nix allows in other platforms. Fortunately things tend to be very solid on Linux. My company has been using Nix in production for about a year now and it has been a huge benefit to platform stability and speed of deployment.

Nix does have binary caching (but only if you use `/nix/store` for the nix store path), I'm using it all the time on linux. OSX support is definitly much less stable though and there have been problems with build machines for OSX in the past, so I do not know how the situation on OSX regarding binary caches is currently.

Regarding your point about build time, I'm not sure why installing with nix would make that much of a difference. Nix still just executes the build system of the underlying packages. However, nix might have to build more packages since it doesn't rely on the underlying system to provide dependencies which helps to make it more robust. Additionally, emacs has various build configurations, which might also require different dependencies, affecting build time.

If there are any bug reports you could file, that would be much appreciated. Installing Emacs should just be a case of downloading the prebuild binaries, which shouldn't take long at all. I use Spacemacs and have never encountered any problems. I have a feeling things are still a lot worse on OSX though...

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