nixos-and-flakes-book VS rules_rust

I'll be honest, the first few times I tried using Nix I just couldn't get into. It was too complex for the benefits I was getting. But that was using Nix on another OS.

I recently switched to NixOS because I wanted what they were selling and the experience this time around was way better. Having no other option but to figure it out made me learn the essentials real quick (like an exchange program to a foreign country that speaks another language).

If you think about it, when you used Ubuntu or Fedora or RHEL for the first time, and probably for a very long time, you could get by without learning the deep intricacies of what is going on behind the scenes. The same is true with NixOS. The things you need to learn are different, but once you get a basic setup with home-manager setup you're off to the races. (Btw, I used this "book" to get started and it was great: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/)

The best part about using NixOS so far is that things just work. Setting up my graphics card was as simple setting enabled = true. Same for configuring specific audio frameworks. And I had tried many times to get Davinci Resolve working on other distros and always encountered issues leading me to need to dual-boot Windows so I could do video editing. Now I just enabled Davinci Resolve and it works! No more Windows.

If you're brand new to linux on the desktop, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you've been doing that for years, maybe try NixOS in 2024.

i'm new to nixos too, i found this

I found this guide really beginner friendly: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

their GH releases page has a PDF, if that helps you, or browsing around the .md files may help what I presume is your noscript browser, assuming that GH works with noscript anymore: https://github.com/ryan4yin/nixos-and-flakes-book/releases/d...

It would be useful if the wiki articles showed a 'last modified at' date. Articles like this [0] dominate search results, but it's not clear how outdated the info is. I

In case anyone is looking for an up-to-date NixOS guide/cookbook, I've found lots of value in this [1] resource.

[0] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/PulseAudio

[1] - https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

The same reason Bazel builds avoid using Cargo when building Rust software, so I'll describe why Bazel would do this:

- Bazel wants to cache remote resources, like each respective crate's source files.

- Bazel then wants to build each crate in a sandbox, and cache the build artifacts

This is an established practice, and Nix wants to drive the build for the same reasons.

See:

- https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

- https://github.com/google/cargo-raze

To answer your question, I don't know if Soong or Bazel can reuse the files produced by an incremental Rust compilation. I tried searching the rules_rust repository and found some discussions, but nothing that clearly told me "Yes, this is supported".

Bazel doesn't allow targeting a lot of platforms (especially embedded) from Rust, even when the Rust ecosystem supports these targets. Something is off with its design if new work needs to be done for every platform that's already available behind an interface that's as consistent as what rustc gives.

What is supported needs to be inferred from this file, as far as I can tell: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust/blob/main/rust/plat...

You might be overjoyed to learn that you can use a build tool that forces you to manually write out the dependencies between each file.

I am using rules_rust and have the VS Code Bazel plugin installed, but I am still not getting autocomplete.

Other than that, the performance of both for builds should be determined exactly by the organization of code into separate crates and the rustc invocations. Bazel generally encourages smaller crates, but that's very subtle. There is at least 1 case I can think of where rustc is overfit to cargo, in a way that is not easily replicable by bazel, which is the metadata/rlib pipelining https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust/issues/228

Rust integrates pretty seamlessly into Bazel projects via rules_rust (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust). The existing rules even allow for c calling rust and rust calling c. Example: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust/blob/main/examples/...

With any compiled language you can use the compiler and vendor your dependencies instead of using the language's conventional package manager. For example, nothing prevents skipping Cargo and building Rust directly with rustc the way Bazel does.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust