Hacker News Reader

For me the biggest benefit is reproducibility. I can get a package to build on any machine exactly the same and with no hidden dependencies.

View on HN

That does seem pretty cool, and I also see it works out-of-the-box on Linux machines. It doesn't seem to have a homebrew-cask equivalent though, which is a bit of a bummer. (Makes sense though since GUI applications aren't really cross-platform.)

How does it handle OS-specific dependencies/distinctions? Or if e.g. a package requires ruby or python to be installed?

We use it on Python projects instead of virtualenv. A problem that you sometimes have with virtualenv is that you must install libpq-dev and python headers and what not to install from pip if the package has native extensions.

With Nix you just declare postgresql as your package inputs and you are done. All needed parts to build and install psycopg2 are there.

Your package/project is completely isolated from your OS libs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com