lorri VS timeout

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

Doing some research I found that one normally uses the timeout script (this however kills processes instead of limiting the amount of resources they can use) or linux control groups. I haven't used any of these on another OS but wonder if this is also the way to do it on NixOs. or would this be done using a nix-shell with some arguments that I am unaware of?

This tool lets you limit the virtual memory that a program uses. It kills the process when it goes over the limit.