[rgrmrts]

If you're happy with brew, by all means continue using it. If asdf is getting you all the languages and tools you need without issue, by all means continue using it. My comment is just adding some details to the parent comment about nix running well on macOS.

EDIT: I doubt your question is in good faith considering the 'cult' comment, but to answer your question at face value regarding benefit the first one that comes to mind is being able to have multiple versions of the same package and being able to rollback to previous versions if something breaks. This also means you can have package A depend on package B v1, and package C depend on package B v2, and both can coexist. If this is not something that's valuable to you, that's fine too. The other killer feature is being able to install dependencies for a project/repository if it uses nix - just clone, cd, and run `nix develop` and you'll have all the dependencies available.

[recuter]

The cult comment was in jest. These are just package managers don't take things so seriously, it is all in good fun.

Yes, I understand the multiple versions of the same package thing - Go/Rust have package managers that quite reliably solve that problem. Pipx also to a certain extent solves that problem.

Brew is useful mostly for casks (browsers, mac apps, fonts) which don't usually call for multiple versions.

I'm sure it is a hairy problem for some combination of languages/tools but I guess I'm somehow completely side stepping it. Perhaps I'm more likely to encounter it if I treated my laptop as a server because that seems more like where Nix might shine as a sort of ansible/chef/puppet on steroids ;)

[rgrmrts]

Fair enough! Yeah, I was using brew as a replacement for something like `apt` or `dnf` on Linux. For example, installing packages like htop, neovim, emacs, etc. For things like Rust I stick with cargo (which is awesome), though I do manage my Go install through nix.