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Comment by mkleczek | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, now when I'm thinking about it - it seems to me Nix main weakness here is that it is a separate language and runtime.

Writing a Maven plugin (ie. a reusable piece of configuration management logic) is easy because you can use any library from the vast Java ecosystem (just add a library as a dependency of your plugin).

Doing the same in Nix requires recreating these libraries in Nix.

Looks like Maven might simply be the right choice...

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You can have a hybrid approach, where you use Nix to provide the build environment (which includes Maven, for example). Then you use the Java-specific tools for the build itself. This should ensure your build has a high degree of reproducibility.

That won't cut it as I need a multi-language build.

And don't get me wrong - I know it _can_ be done in Nix (as it is a programming language) - the question is _how easy_ it is to create/maintain it.

Let's say my solution requires a Java Spring Boot application, React client, custom Postgres extension and Python ML code.

Well, you can provide in your environment all the binaries needed:

- Java stuff

- node and npm

- I don't know what you would need for Postgres extensions

- Python, pip or poetry (or whatever you use for Python package management)

Here is an example flake: https://bpa.st/ZUQQ

Under `devShells`, you have `packages`. You can put there any package from nixpkgs, not just Python packages like I have there.

To make it cleaner, you could have a variable for each platform and concatenate them under packages like

    `packages = javaPkgs ++ nodePkgs ++ pgPkgs ++ pyPkgs`.

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