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My First Impressions of Nix

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Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#5

Post by troupo »

> A lot of Nix documentation I’ve found says things like, “Simply add these lines!”

> Huh?

> Which file? And where in the file do I add those lines?

This issue is prevalent everywhere. Even the best documented projects fail into this trap almost immediately.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#7

Post by lvncelot »

I'm a huge fan of Nix, and I'm glad to have stuck with the often times daunting process of getting into it - and I have to agree with the author's point regarding the documentation. That's not a fault of the people who actually did sit down and document their process, or distill their learning path into a tutorial - I myself understand it well enough to use it, but not well enough to really explain it without confusing people even more, but it's still a pity that finding good, exhaustive documentation for Nix is really difficult.

Another pitfall is the usage of flakes, which, on the one hand are (imho) great, recommended everywhere and often times even assumed to be used implicitly, but on the other hand are still experimental. I myself started using flakes not because of the promised benefit (although I did realize the benefit later on) but just because multiple tutorials I've read gave me the feeling that flakes were the de facto way to do Nix from now on - and mind you, that was in late 2020.

I'm using Nix for setting up my work machine (Mac via nix-darwin), my private machines (NixOS), selfhosting that's not in my k8s (also NixOS), and some private projects (dependencies, ci, and containers) - where the issues I've described don't really bother me, but for professional projects, where I'd have to convince and/or instruct colleagues, Nix feels a bit too rough around the edges for me right now.

Edit: I also think it's important to distinguish between Nix the technology (fantastic) and Nix the language (meh) - which is why I'm still itching to try out Guix[1], which is similar to Nix (the technology) in a lot of ways while using Guile[2] as a language.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#8

Post by hamandcheese »

> Nix, on the other hand, does have a concept of state. If you make a one-line change to a 200-line Nix configuration, it doesn’t have to re-do all the work from the other 199 lines. It can evaluate the state of the system against the configuration file and recognize that it just has to apply the one-line change. And that change usually happens in a few seconds.

The author seems to have some misguided ideas about Nix. Nix is not fast because it is stateful. It is fast because it is functional and reproducible, which allows for caching without compromising correctness. I don't want to split hairs, but referentially transparent caching like this is not quite what I'd call state.

Yes, there is some statefulness in system activation, but this is not what makes Nix Nix -- quite the opposite.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#9

Post by rendaw »

troupo wrote: post #5

> A lot of Nix documentation I’ve found says things like, “Simply add these lines!” > Huh? > Which file? And where in the file do I add those lines? This issue is prevalent everywhere . Even the best documented projects fail into this trap almost immediately.

And why, what do those lines mean
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