|
|
|
|
|
|
by rgoulter
1275 days ago
|
|
|
> Tools like Bazel or Nix or ... I find it interesting that Bazel and Nix don't seem to complement each other as much as I'd think given that they're both 'high effort, high reward tools which deal with hermetic building'. They certainly both suffer from issues related to upstream packages doing their own thing. > They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) ... I use Nix. I haven't use Bazel. I think Nix is wonderful for enthusiasts. It takes some time to learn. However, Nix is excellent at dealing with packages. And developers often do things which involve packages. -- e.g. Nix is good for declaring a shell with programs that can be made available. |
|
|
Having used both Bazel and Nix, I agree they suffer here but with a slightly different take: They suffer because they must reinvent the wheel and provide a new API to mimic the upstream package managers. They're in a constant race to keep pace with best practices outside of their community - and patch their APIs accordingly which become "dirty mirrors", only partially reflecting the intent and functionality of upstream tooling.
But that's kind of the point - they apparently need to take over and constrain the system to fully understand the dependency tree.
I wish there was a Bazel/Nix/Guix build tool that had some barrier between the dependency tree and the developer tools that one uses daily. When I'm building the system as a whole, I don't want to think about cargo vs npm. But when I'm writing code for a given component, the native tooling is the correct abstraction. Is it even theoretically possible to resolve those two ideas without introducing another glue language?