After 20 years are developers now ready for Nix?

computing.co.uk

6 points·Areibman··3 comments

I work for Flox and maintain Nix. AMA

I'm excited to see more interest in the core ideas this technology brings. Our vision is to make it accessible - bring this set of super-powers to the world.

how do you see Nix being affected or not by newer package management systems with built-in sandboxing and layering, such as OCI container images on the server side or flatpak on the desktop side?

We've seen the opposite. New package managers are built with a much better understanding of the problem space because of Nix and sometimes explicitly taking ideas and concepts. This results in those new systems being far more compatible and easily integrated with Nix itself. Consider the iteration towards better and better locking in python + Node. Consider Rust/Cargo.

There has also been sharing of ideas and collaboration between things us and bazel/buck/spack/etc. I think it is clear that we are all moving towards a similar end state, that often looks very much like Nix, or a re-invention of it.

For things like OCI, Nix predates it, but we should start to re-use the standard. The Tvix group is exploring this and I'd suspect our sandboxing will be OCI at some point. For outputs; we make it easy to convert a Nix package into an equivalent container. Things like flatpack,AppImage,Snap should also be easy for people to output (i'm trying to collect these "transformers"/"bundlers" here: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers).

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