It feels like Nix is crossing some kind of developer awareness threshhold. For me as someone perusing various tech threads, this feels like the year that, among developers, Nix is going mainstream.
We just adopted nix at work so it def. feels like that from my point of view. If anyone reads this, here’s why I’ve been avoiding (and building without it) even though I wish I could use it:
- slow as hell on mac
- doesn’t work well with a project that makes use of Rust. We have weird rules for building and being able to dev with the Rust side (basically the devshell will try not to create a derivation for the rust stuff). Also every update of cargo.lock or rust-toolchain will break the nix install.
- doesn’t work well with my tools (vscode). There’s a nix env plugin but it doesn’t work with flakes. Direnv plugins exist as well but they didn’t seem to work for me.
- the shell doesn’t work without passing -i for me. Some env vars seem to break my nix
> - doesn’t work well with my tools (vscode). There’s a nix env plugin but it doesn’t work with flakes. Direnv plugins exist as well but they didn’t seem to work for me.
The direnv plugin works with flakes for me using sn envrc reading `use flake` and using the home manager package nix-direnv.
> In general it feels like all the devs that are working on nix are not on mac, don’t use vscode, prolly don’t use Rust as well.
I think this is untrue, especially for rust. I know vscode is pretty popular with nix users too.
My main mission is to make Nix and Nix-based technology mainstream. Please reach out if you are interested, have thoughts or ideas. (plus we're hiring: https://floxdev.com/careers )
This involves improving Nix itself, as well as building tooling for teams and organizations to be successful.
