[Fiadliel]

I know it's less of an issue for go users, but one of the great things about nix is how your runtime dependencies are (mostly) defined by inference from the programs you've built. So, if you build a program that links against libpg.so, the runtime requirements will automatically include that library!

Since your runtime requirements depend on how you compile a system, you usually have to be quite careful with keeping your Dockerfile in sync with what you're building. This busywork just goes away.

Nix involves quite a large upfront time commitment to understand it, but it solves problems that I haven't seen solved elsewhere (well, I guess guix is similar), and does it across all the languages you write for. That it can work across toolchains and languages is a unifying force, and so I think it's one of the better systems for reducing the "exponential fragmentation" referred to above.

[Fiadliel]

Actually, the thing we started using nix for was reliable caching of compiled artifacts, including not just your code, but all the programs and libraries that your code depends on. It's another thing that's difficult to do in a general sense, but if you have a fairly strong notion of reproducible builds, it's possible.