[ghostwriter]

It does run `dune build`, but the unit of persistence within Nix is defined as `buildDunePackage`, i.e. the Nix store will only know about the package rather than individual modules and a change in a single module will cause a cascading rebuild of the entire package to update the nix store.

[toastal]

There are tools out there for other languages that _can_ handle incremental & per-modules builds, such as purs-nix for PureScript, so if opam-nix doesn't now, I'm sure it will in the future as a lot of projects are asking for this feature.

[ghostwriter]

> what does dune actually offer me if I’m using Nix to manage dependencies already?

purs-nix is a good example that even if per-module compilation is made into derivations, the rest of the remaining heavy-lifting of constraints resolution is done by the external build tool. You can think of Nix as a dependency manager, but only with a huge caveat that it doesn't actually manage constraints that come with those dependencies, especially transitive ones.

[toastal]

That's a good read but I'm still unclear on dune vs. ocamlfind/ocamlopt. Is dune not using those under the covers like Nix could?