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Will Nix Overtake Docker?

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Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#111

Post by [deleted] »

lvass wrote: post #61
exdsq wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix can do everything and that's an issue - suddenly the CI servers, AWS deployments, build servers, testing, linting, dev package management, dev system environments, and more are all written in Nix packages. You need to write nix bindings. You need to add nix caching. And, as is fitting with a functional language, it can be beautifully (read: painfully) abstract. Some of the guys on the team were contributors to Ni…

Sounds like your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Would it be nicer if you just used Nix to build the application and a shell, in the simplest possible manner?

[deleted]

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#112

Post by kaba0 »

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…

That’s because Docker just pushes dependency management to one layer below, doesn’t solve it.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#113

Post by aitchnyu »

I used Docker Compose to, among other things, manage Postgres, which wants to listen to port 5432 and use a central dir to hold databases. Can a non Docker solution allow me to run multiple instances of Postgres?

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#114

Post by wereHamster »

Barrin92 wrote: post #60
exdsq wrote: post #29

Oh god I hope not. Having worked in > 100kloc nix environments I am completely turned off of the idea. I really really tried, I installed NixOS as my main OS and used Nix whenever I could to try and pick it up, but it's such a complex beast I felt it slowed everything down. Simple tasks that would take 10 minutes in Docker suddenly became DevOps tickets. I suddenly had to write bindings for tools rather than apt-get…

>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?

> moving closer to the heat death of the universe

So… you're saying your laptop is super cool? Because the heat death of the universe is when thermodynamic energy is equally distributed everywhere, which, given the large space of the universe, means really cold.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#115

Post by rgoulter »

beermonster wrote: post #110
eximius wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is extremely concerning, then, that it is so difficult to use after all that time. I had hopes in the back of my head that "maybe it'll get better/more ergonomic in the next few years".

Is it? Or is it just a tool that requires a different mindset so those coming to it from another regular distro? If the latter, then I’m not sure it’s something they will see as a problem but more its very ethos.

Maybe an apt comparison is git.

It's just as easy to make a mistake with git today as it was however many years ago; git hasn't fundamentally changed in ways that make it easier. Git still more/less requires you to have a good understanding of what's going on in order to be comfortable using it.

But, since use of git is now widespread, it's less of an issue. And the git CLI has seen some UX improvements.

Nix is very weird. I'm sure there are some ways its UX could be nicer; but to some extent, doing things in a strict/pure way is always going to have friction if the tools/environments don't easily support that.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#116

Post by laumars »

rgoulter wrote: post #47
exdsq wrote: post #29

Oh god I hope not. Having worked in > 100kloc nix environments I am completely turned off of the idea. I really really tried, I installed NixOS as my main OS and used Nix whenever I could to try and pick it up, but it's such a complex beast I felt it slowed everything down. Simple tasks that would take 10 minutes in Docker suddenly became DevOps tickets. I suddenly had to write bindings for tools rather than apt-get…

> There's a blog post that goes around from time to time about how a company have three risk tokens to allocate per project on non-boring technologies. https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

I hadn’t seen that before but it perfectly sums up my approach to tech. I’m going to share this the next time someone questions why I take a pragmatic approach rather than jumping on the next new tech stack

Thanks for sharing

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#117

Post by greatgib »

Along my life, i have worked with a lot of build systems, but I find Nix syntax and commands to be completely awful!

I see that it could be useful, but it completely turns me down immediately.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#118

Post by fulafel »

exdsq wrote: post #29

Oh god I hope not. Having worked in > 100kloc nix environments I am completely turned off of the idea. I really really tried, I installed NixOS as my main OS and used Nix whenever I could to try and pick it up, but it's such a complex beast I felt it slowed everything down. Simple tasks that would take 10 minutes in Docker suddenly became DevOps tickets. I suddenly had to write bindings for tools rather than apt-get…

Was/would it be hard to switch back to traditional containers or was there some kind of lock-in effect? Or was the consensus just pro-Nix?

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#119

Post by fulafel »

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…

Lots of people seem to be building containers with non-Dockerfile based things though, especially in the JVM world.

Re: Will Nix Overtake Docker?

#120

Post by amarshall »

beermonster wrote: post #110
eximius wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is extremely concerning, then, that it is so difficult to use after all that time. I had hopes in the back of my head that "maybe it'll get better/more ergonomic in the next few years".

Is it? Or is it just a tool that requires a different mindset so those coming to it from another regular distro? If the latter, then I’m not sure it’s something they will see as a problem but more its very ethos.

The latter. As a (bad) analogy: it’s a bit like learning Haskell. If you’ve only ever worked in strictly-evaluated, imperative languages, it’s not gonna be easy to learn. Nevertheless, Haskell predates e.g. Go by two decades.

Nix (and Haskell) has its warts, and undoubtedly a new system would avoid them (compatibility needs make some changes very challenging), but the fundamental difficulty remains because it is fundamentally different and solving a truly difficult problem set.

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