buildkit-nix VS nix.dev

Nix solves a different problem than Hocus. Nix lets you define a development environment, Hocus gives you a way to run it. Right now we use Dockerfiles to let users define the packages they need in their dev env, but we would like to support Nix in the future too. Interestingly, you can use custom BuildKit syntax https://docs.docker.com/build/dockerfile/frontend/ to build Nix environments with Docker https://github.com/reproducible-containers/buildkit-nix, and that's probably what we will end up supporting.

Nix (https://nix.dev/) can provide all of this, although in a smarter way than just through dumping everything in the VCS. Some projects use it already to provide a reproducible development environment and if done right a clean build is just a `nix-build` away.

Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them.

https://nixos.org/explore

https://nix.dev/

if you want something a more in-depth, zero to nix is a great resource for all things nix (they have a section dedicated to flakes here, but i would pay attention to the notice at the top about reading some other things first), along with nix.dev, and of course, the nixos wiki article on flakes

On nix.dev it say I would need to cross compile to make it work, is there some way in which i can build natively on my machine.

Hey

Cachix founder here. Here are a few links for getting started:

- https://nix.dev Nix tutorials

- https://devenv.sh Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments

Let me know if you have any questions. Domen

Nix pills and nix.dev are my favorites, alongside the official documentation.

https://nix.dev/ is the best in depth resource I know but it's a work in progress.

For folks looking to understand why this is so https://nix.dev and https://devenv.sh/