Angle brackets in a Nix flake world

fzakaria.com

23 pointssetheron4 comments

I work with Nix a lot, and I had never seen `__findFile`.

It's kind of crazy how much there is to know about Nix. I wish there was a bit less surface area to the language. On the other hand it's really interesting how much specialized knowledge there is in the community around various topics. Some people package things, some people write library code, some write glue code that wraps other build tools, some write VM-based tests, some write generators that transform store paths into things like container images, some just manage their dot files, some are experts for how we deal with some specific proprietary ecosystem like cuda, some write infra code or tools around the Nix code, some work on one of the Nix implementations.

As someone who runs NixOS on my home machine, I feel this. I have an okay handle on day-to-day operations on my machine but a lot of it still feels like magic to me in both a good a scary sense. I'm still looking for great resources to go deep on Nix and really grok it.

Same that's why I wrote the blog :)

Even the 'scopedImport' builtin isn't documented.

I agree. Kind of feels there's a lot to learn but also Nix is a complete departure from how we traditionally built software.

So if you think about all the implicit knowledge you carry with you when you move to other tooling, it's probably comparable.

As a current PhD student (working on Nix stuff) let me take this opportunity to congratulate you on your successful PhD defense and publicly thank you for your writing. That you write and what you write are inspiring.

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