I see the instructions discuss $(mkdir /zb) https://github.com/256lights/zb#linux-or-macos > and after seeing references to Nix I wanted to ensure this wasn't a hard-and-fast directory choice since macOS has immutable / and it causes no end to the Nix stupidity on macOS
Zb: An Early-Stage Build System
131–132 of 132 posts
Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The repo being evaluated? Not an issue for me. In the dev scenario disk is plentiful; in production it can be garbage collected out or avoided by using copy-closure type workflows or nix2container (eg just not running nix evaluations directly in the target environment).
That makes sense. I naively tried flakes for a nix-shell replacement for a couple environments, one was a node app with large node_modules dependencies and the other was a windows app I was running in a local wine root. In both cases re-evaluating the flake was very slow because of the volume of data being copied. I want to do more with flakes but I’m skeptical that they end up being a good per-app workflow when the…
That said, I think the node story overall is still pretty rough. There are several competing tools/workflows each with different tradeoffs. My frontend team did a brief evaluation and basically just noped out of it— there's so much tooling in the node world that just gets you directly from your lockfiles right to a deployable container, it's harder to see the value of a Nix closure as an intermediate build object; the case is a lot less clear for it than for, say, Python or C++ stuff.