lorri VS naersk

lorri

And how does niv compare to https://github.com/target/lorri

Yes, you can "hold on", it's called gcroots. There's lorri which you can also use to defer the tediousness of managing the gcroots to a daemon.

Not that I know of but if you are having trouble with rebuilding and running out of memory, maybe the solution would be to cache the builds locally? You could use lorri to cache your development builds (https://github.com/target/lorri).

> Using a special command (nix-shell) whenever I needed to do development things (e.g. Rust builds) was not my idea of fun.

Funny you should mention that, because that's exactly what got me using Nix everywhere :). I've always hated installing tools and libraries globally—what if I need a different version for a future project?—so I like tools that sandbox as much as possible like virtualenv, cargo, cabal... etc. But these tools are all language-specific and have their own limitations (especially around native libraries and dependencies written in other languages).

nix-shell gives me the equivalent of virtualenv that works for everything. I can have a single sandboxed environment even if my project uses a bunch of different languages and I can manage everything in a reproducible, low-overhead fashion. No more worrying about making a mess by installing tools or packages globally.

Then, once I got really used to that, I spent some time setting up direnv[1] and lorri[2]—both of which are themselves managed with Nix, of course!—so that my environment gets automatically configured as soon as I enter a project directory without needing to call nix-shell explicitly. To be honest, the experience is still a bit rough, but it works well enough day-to-day that I have my reproducible sandbox cake and eat it in an mostly frictionless way too :).

[1]: https://direnv.net/

[2]: https://github.com/target/lorri

i would also recommend using crane or naersk since iirc rustPlaform.buildRustPackage can mangle some of these options (or maybe i just did something wrong lol)

Have a look at naersk, it neither requires generated Nix files nor IFD.

We use naersk[0] for Rust projects in our Nix monorepo (for example [1]). It's pretty hands-off in terms of the Nix code needed (you don't need to pin hashes inside of the Nix code as long as you have a Cargo lockfile) and all the existing tooling keeps working fine.

The main drawback of it is that it currently builds all of your dependencies in one big derivation, so any dependency changes cause a full rebuild. There's some other project I saw fly by which attempts to do a similar thing but split each crate into a separate derivation, but I forgot what it's called and have no experience with it.

[0]: https://github.com/nix-community/naersk

[1]: https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot/-/blob/ops/journaldriver/default.ni...

You can also use naersk¹ if you want to avoid a two-step process. It's especially convenient when using nix flakes.

¹https://github.com/nix-community/naersk

I created https://github.com/nmattia/napalm/issues/34 and https://github.com/nmattia/naersk/issues/183 to move them to nix-community

sounds exactly like what naersk does. naersk doesn't need a cargSha256 argument since it downloads dependencies from Cargo.lock. it can also grab the version number from Cargo.toml