ic VS cargo2nix

Internet Computer blockchain (ICP) — a general-purpose blockchain system developed by the DFINITY Foundation (written in Rust);

Yes, non-rust dependencies can be a pain. We addressed this issue in three ways: 1. Sometimes, it just works™ if the crate has a copy of the C code and uses the cc crate to compile it. It's usually slow to compile C in a build script, but it works. 2. Sometimes, we write a custom BUILD script for direct dependencies and link external libraries by hand. Example: lmdb and lmdb-sys. 3. If all of the above is not an option or is too much work, we add a native library to the Docker container that runs our builds.

One thing that sticks out to me is that, while their code is open source, it has a restrictive license, the Apache License: https://github.com/dfinity/ic/blob/master/LICENSE - most open source projects opt for the MIT License.

Sources please? https://github.com/dfinity/ic/pulse talks of only ~100 commits (IC only, not including the other repos)

https://github.com/dfinity/ic/graphs/contributors You can see there are many contributors, whose own GitHub profiles show contributions to OTHER projects. For example, just clicking on one contributor, John Wiegley (Principal Engineer at DFINITY), you will see a long history of open source contributions: https://github.com/jwiegley

You can see the code here: https://github.com/dfinity/ic

- Rust projects are built with https://github.com/cargo2nix/cargo2nix. We chose cargo2nix to get incremental builds, meaning that dependency builds can be shared between our Rust projects and that not all dependencies have to be rebuilt when adding/updating/removing dependencies from a project.

We used cargo2nix to generate top-level Cargo.nix file that we committed to the repository (we didn't allow generating nix files on CI for security and reproducibility reasons).

There's a cross compile example that works for at least 3-4 targets on Linux and uses proc macros. Pretty sure the situation you described is no more complex.

Release notes. Last announced release was 0.9.0.

Nix already solves this problem and can handle dependencies and building projects across a range of languages (including Rust via Cargo2nix) and reproducible machine configuration.

Building with nix, for instance with cargo2nix (https://github.com/cargo2nix/cargo2nix), could be safer if sandboxing is enabled.

cargo2nix