This is cool! We do something similar in Devbox where we pre-evaluate store paths from the Nix repository, and then fetch the packages directly from the official Nix cache. This greatly reduces the evaluation time.
We also do something similar at garnix, but when enabling incremental builds. Instead of just skipping the build stage, we also “normalize” the eval into just the store path, and skipping it the second time around.
Mentioned in passing in https://garnix.io/blog/incremental-builds. This is even more significant because in this case you might otherwise be eval-ing several layers of flakes.
Mentioned in passing in https://garnix.io/blog/incremental-builds. This is even more significant because in this case you might otherwise be eval-ing several layers of flakes.