[throwaway894345]

On the other hand, Nix and Bazel and friends are a lot of pain. I'm sure the tradeoff makes sense in a lot of situations, but not needing to bring in Nix or Bazel just to manage dependencies is a pretty big boon. It would be great to see some of the all-in-one build tools become more usable though. Maybe one day it will seem insane that every language ecosystem has its own build tool because there's some all-in-one tool that is just as easy to use as `(car)go build`!

[331c8c71]

Well Nix is the only sane way I know to manage fully reproducible envs that incorporate programs/scripts spanning multiple ecosystems. Very common situation in applied data analysis.

[ghthor]

Nix is a 10x force multiplier for managing Linux systems. The fact that I can write python, go, bash, jq, any tool that is right for the job of managing and configuring the system is amazing. And on top of that I can patch any part of the entire system with just that, a patch from my fork on GitHub or anywhere else.

Top that off with first class programming capabilities and modularization and I can share common configuration and packages across systems. And add that those same customized packages can be directly included in a dev shell making all of the amazing software out there available for tooling and support. Really has changed my outlook and I have so much fun now not EVER dealing with tooling issues except when I have explicitly upgrade my shell and nixpkgs version.

I just rebuilt our CI infrastructure with nix and was a able to configure multiple dockerd isolated daemons per host, calculate the subnet spread for all the networks, write scripts configuring the env so you can run docker1 and hit daemon 1. Now we can saturate our CI machines with more parallel work without them fighting over docker system resources like ports. Never would have attempting doing this without nix, being able to generate the entire system config tree and inspect systemd service configs befor even applying to a host reduced my iteration loop to an all time low in the infrastructure land where 10-15mins lead times of building images to find out I misspelling Kafka and kakfa somewhere and now need to rebuild again for 15mins. Now I get almost instant feedback for most of these types of errors.

[eisbaw]

> Maybe one day it will seem insane that every language ecosystem has its own build tool because there's some all-in-one tool that is just as easy to use as `(car)go build`!

Yep: Nix

[throwaway894345]

Unless you’re packaging anything or consuming packages or teasing out the conflicting advice from the community on which nix-related tooling to use or literally anything else of interest.

[jscheel]

oh man, don't even bother with bazel... hermetic python builds are such a mess.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I burn my face on that particular stove once every 3 years or so.