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Will Nix Overtake Docker?

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Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#81

Post by nirui »

salamander014 wrote: post #9

I think people are missing the forest for the trees with this. In my view, the reason Docker has all the hype is because I can look at a Dockerfile, and know what's up. In seconds. Sometimes in milliseconds. It's a user experience thing. Yes, Nix is better for 'technical people that spent the time learning the tool', but Dockerfiles rely almost entirely on existing System knowledge. Yes, Nix is 'better', but the fact…

Agreed with your opinion about `Dockerfile`. The article had me for a second until I saw the script code. I mean, my time is not infinite and I rather spend it to do things that are really important to me, not learning to write "yet-another build script" for a small system. So unless it's mainstream already, I'm not going to touch it.

`Dockerfile` is light enough for me to not hate it too much.

For the `docker-compose.yaml` story however, I can offer one reason: when you have so many variants(versions), so many setting options and so many data types (array, object, string etc), it's hard to find references to write one from scratch (have to read multiple documents to get it right). Your knowledge on docker command-line parameters does not translate to `docker-compose.yaml` smoothly(some option changed names, some don't work). And sometimes, some function works differently under docker-compose.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#82

Post by wyager »

salamander014 wrote: post #9

I think people are missing the forest for the trees with this. In my view, the reason Docker has all the hype is because I can look at a Dockerfile, and know what's up. In seconds. Sometimes in milliseconds. It's a user experience thing. Yes, Nix is better for 'technical people that spent the time learning the tool', but Dockerfiles rely almost entirely on existing System knowledge. Yes, Nix is 'better', but the fact…

I think you are confusing a property of your expertise with a property of the tool. As someone who doesn't use docker all the time, I find it kind of a pain in the ass to read realistic dockerfiles or work with docker-compose. As a juxtaposition I found freebsd jails much more pleasant and sane to work with for security containerization. For deployment management I'm not sure if there are competitors to docker but it's not hard to imagine something vastly more pleasant to use.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#83

Post by yewenjie »

I love Nix and NixOS, but sometimes it is extremely painful to get complex software which expects FHS to work. For example, I have spent a day trying to get Android Studio for React Native set up and failed.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#84

Post by wyager »

tyingq wrote: post #73
xxpor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix supports this quite well. https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#multiple-versions The Nix and container mindset are very similar in that they refer to all of their dependencies, including down to glibc.

Does Nix understand network namespacing? Or would 2 postgres instances clash over tcp listen ports? I get you could configure different ports, or virtual interfaces, but it sounds like either of those would be outside of the nix tooling.

I don't think it would be possible to do this in an OS-agnostic way. LXC and jails are too different, and I'm not even sure what the option would be in macOS.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#85

Post by AzzieElbab »

wyager wrote: post #79
Barrin92 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Build times in Haskell were bad enough this one's very true. Every time I try to build something in Haskell on my laptop it feels like we're moving closer to the heat death of the universe. Is there some good read on how/why Haskell compilation times are so long compared to some other languages?

If you're compiling a project for the first time it's probably pulling in a ton of libraries and compiling them all from scratch. But let's be real here - we're talking maybe 3-5 minutes for the first build of a huge Haskell codebase, one or two orders of magnitude faster on second build. It seems comparable to what I've noticed with Rust or C, and pretty fast compared to some medium/large C++ codebases I've built. I…

From my experience with Haskell and Scala, derivations and not dependencies is what’s driving compile time. You can probably hide a crypto miner behind all that compiler magic. In Scala I usually move code that invokes a lot of derivations into sub projects, not a clue on how to do that in Haskell

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#86

Post by CameronNemo »

lolpython wrote: post #78
edude03 wrote: post #2

No, it definitely (but unfortunately) will not. Nix does everything docker does better than docker does, except most crucially, integrate with non nix tooling. Nix vs Docker is like Rust vs JavaScript - you can point out every reason js is terrible and rust is better, but for the common developer looking to get things done, they’ll often gravitate to the tool that gets them the biggest impact with the least upfront i…

Yes, and Nix can still lose on maintainability in the long run, considering it is more difficult to onboard new devs with it. They have to learn the Nix expression language and write custom bindings for much software instead of calling the native package manager inside Docker.

I don't understand how these are comparable. I also don't understand what you mean by "bindings". Do you mean writing nix derivations for new packages? I would much rather do that than fiddle with Debian packaging. Or do you mean writing nix modules to configure a service? There are certainly some (IMO) over engineered nixos modules, but there are also some dead simple ones.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#88

Post by CameronNemo »

zamadatix wrote: post #27

Somewhat not related and likely dumb question but I figure folks looking at this article can help steer me in the right direction: if I want containers to act like Linux VMs what's the best option? Like Docker minus the assumption that I only want a few specific directories to persist or the idea I'm interested in layering containers in a way that lets me reproduce building them. Like if I just want another separate…

LXD is probably the most polished option. I believe it is packaged and up to date on Alpine.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#89

Post by CameronNemo »

oddlama wrote: post #36
zamadatix wrote: post #27

Somewhat not related and likely dumb question but I figure folks looking at this article can help steer me in the right direction: if I want containers to act like Linux VMs what's the best option? Like Docker minus the assumption that I only want a few specific directories to persist or the idea I'm interested in layering containers in a way that lets me reproduce building them. Like if I just want another separate…

You might want to have a look at systemd-nspawn [1], which is basically containerized chroot based on linux namespaces. [1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-nsp...

I don't think you can easily use systemd-nspawn on Alpine.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#90

Post by mayli »

cbrewster wrote: post #26
salamander014 wrote: post #9

I think people are missing the forest for the trees with this. In my view, the reason Docker has all the hype is because I can look at a Dockerfile, and know what's up. In seconds. Sometimes in milliseconds. It's a user experience thing. Yes, Nix is better for 'technical people that spent the time learning the tool', but Dockerfiles rely almost entirely on existing System knowledge. Yes, Nix is 'better', but the fact…

Author here. As with most things, its all about the trade-offs. Docker has certainly proved itself and that approach has worked on a massive scale. However, its not a silver bullet. For us at Replit, our Docker approach was causing issues: our base image was large and unmaintainable and we had almost no way of knowing what changed between subsequent builds of the base image. We've been able to utilize Nix to address…

Correct, that's one of the cases where docker's layered image system doesn't work well. Nix is almost the perfect tool to perform incremental builds and deployments for the Replit requirements.

I wish that docker has the ability to merge multiple parent layers like git, then you can build the gigantic image by just updating single layer.

The only hack the docker can do is multistage-build, however that won't work reliably in some cases such as resolving conflicts.

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