[clhodapp]

OK, wow, this is interesting indeed. I didn't realize just how much of a re-do of the build engine Buildkit was, I had just thought of it as a next-gen internal build engine, running off of Dockerfiles.

Applying this information to the topic at hand:

Given what Buildkit actually does, I bet someone could create a compiler that does a decent job transforming nix "derivations", the underlying declarative format that the nix daemon uses to run builds, into these declarative Buildkit protobuf objects and run nix builds on Buildkit instead of the nix daemon. To make this concrete, we would be converting from something that looked like this: https://gist.github.com/clhodapp/5d378e452d1c4993a5e35cd043d.... So basically, run "bash" with those args and environment variables, with those derivations show below already built and their outputs made visible.

Once that exists, it should also be possible to create a frontend that consumes a list of nix "installables" (how you refer to specific concrete packages) and produces an oci image out of the nix package repository, without relying on the nix builder to actually run any of it.

This would subsume the purpose of e.g. https://nixery.dev/

[cpuguy83]

https://github.com/reproducible-containers/buildkit-nix

[clhodapp]

That is really cool!