tag: Nix

There’s a lot going on in the Nix ecosystem. If you haven’t slogged through the thesis then it might seem downright opaque. This is my attempt at an easy explainer for newcomers. The Tool and the Language Let’s bootstrap ourselves with some circular facts. Nix is a tool for building (or “packaging”) software components using instructions expressed in the Nix language. The Nix language is even able to package the Nix tool (which is mostly written in C++), thus closing the epistemological loop. ...

In the marketplace of developer skills, there’s a certain category that I’m long-term bearish on. They don’t warrant investing free time trying to level up. Devs should limit their exposure to the minimum necessary to do their job. I’m talking about tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and the intricate managed hosting platforms of Azure and AWS. These are tools that help manage social problems caused by scaling organizations to thousands of engineers existing complexity laziness or desire to throw money at a problem rather than solve it While they do solve real technical problems, I’ll argue here that there’s superior tooling for most use cases outside of big tech and legacy systems. ...

The inordinate usefulness of Nix really sinks in when you realize that it allows you to define a single piece of unified infrastructure for handling all the different parts of the software lifecycle. Furthermore, this infrastructure doesn’t even need to be project-specific. For a given class of projects, the “holy grail” Nix flake template defines all the following: All the dependencies, pinned in the flake.lock and updatable with nix flake update. A dev environment accessible with nix develop. A package derivation that encapsulates the build process in a nix build command. A module that exposes the app as a configurable system-level service that can be leveraged in integration checks with nix flake check. With these things in place, activities that traditionally create overhead for developers (environment and deployment) are abstracted and standardized. And even though other tools solve similar problems, none of them achieve the universality of the Nix model. That’s because the most natural and complete description of software packaging is as pure functions over store paths. But in this post I’m focusing on convenience. The correctness of Nix, and the fact that correctness leads to convenience, are topics for a different post. ...