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Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

To see and play with what people are building with Nix on Replit check out the #nix hashtag here: https://replit.com/apps/nix

Users vary from teachers building environments for their classrooms, to hackers tinkering with emulators, to kids making old games like run online.

We think we’re just scratching the surface with what we can do with Nix. It’s an outrageously underrated technology.

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> We think we’re just scratching the surface with what we can do with Nix. It’s an outrageously underrated technology.

Super agree and watching from afar. Would love to see a blog post from replit "why not docker" (which is likely to go into how docker is the wrong sort of encapsulation, caching, source/binary substitution?)

Docker and Nix are orthogonal; Docker is mostly a tool for packaging things in a standard way, Nix is a way of specifying build instructions.

But many people (ab)use Docker to solve the kinds of problems that Nix would have been better suited to solve.

Some people use Nix to build Docker images. They say it's very good for that.

It is, nix is more declarative than a dockerfile and can even optimize the layers based on the dependency graph. See https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images for a good explanation and https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-pkgs-dockerTool... for all of nix’s container related documentation.

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