nocargo VS devenv

Compare nocargo vs devenv and see what are their differences.

nocargo

[alpha] Build Rust crates with Nix Build System. (by oxalica)

devenv

Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments (by cachix)
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nocargo devenv
2 85
115 3,101
- 9.3%
3.5 9.8
21 days ago 5 days ago
Nix Nix
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nocargo

Posts with mentions or reviews of nocargo. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-24.
  • Nix shell related questions (for rust)
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 24 Dec 2022
    If you want to iterate with nix instead of cargo, crate2nix and cargo2nix provides more caching and more fine control over your dependencies. I haven't used these two so you would have to decide for yourself. You may also want to try out nocargo for something more experimental.
  • Perfect Docker Images for Rust with Nix
    7 projects | /r/rust | 1 Sep 2022
    Thank you. It looks very useful, so I’ll give it a try. Do you know, offhand, whether I can use crane to build a dependency specified in Cargo.toml with extra settings? I have a more complicated Rust application I’m trying to build with Nix. The solution I’ve arrived at for the moment is building with nocargo just so I can override OUT_DIR when building opencv, but it doesn’t work with LTO and the end result is inferior to my starting point. (If there’s a way to customize the opencv build without needing any extra packages, I’d love to hear about that too.)

devenv

Posts with mentions or reviews of devenv. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-23.
  • Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Mar 2024
    https://devenv.sh/ and nix in general are great for setting up dev environments.
  • Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2024
    > but worried that the development is not moving forward

    There is an open v1.0 PR: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/1005

    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2024
  • Ask HN: How can I make local dev with containers hurt less?
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
    It would be a smoother transition for most I imagine to use nix via https://devenv.sh/ even if only for it's excellent documentation.
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
    Yup, I haven’t tried it but there is https://devenv.sh which is built on top of nix and makes it simple.
  • Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
    Although Guix reads better than Nix (after all, it's Lisp), I found the support and resources available for learning severely lacking.

    Plus, you have to jump through hoops to install non-free software, which goes against the ethos of Guix anyway.

    IMHO, Nix is clearly "the winner" here and we'll see more and more adoption as it improves. Lots of folks are doing exciting work (see https://determinate.systems/, https://devenv.sh/, https://flakehub.com/). And the scale and organization around nixpkgs is damn impressive.

  • NixOS has one fatal flaw
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    I don't think you can ever get Nix as simple as PNPM, simply because native libraries are sometimes annoying, need to be configured at build time to a greater degree and because the problem space it attacks is so much larger than PNPM, which only deals with the JS/Node.js ecosystem.

    However, I do think that there exist reasonable levels of abstraction that sacrifice some expressive power for simplicity and such systems could maybe expose a PNPM-like CLI. One example that comes to mind is devenv.nix [1]. While it doesn't yet have a CLI, its configuration file is YAML and relatively simple. I think there's more to be done in this space and I hope for tools that are easier to grasp in the future.

    > Nix package files evaluate down to configuration for the Nix package manager, but I haven’t ever seen a good explanation for the basic essentials underneath all the abstraction. Every guide I’ve learned from and all the package defs I’ve read seem to cargo cult many layers of mysterious config composing config. Without easy to learn essentials it’s difficult to grok the system as a whole.

    To me it sounds like the essential that you're referring to is the 'derivation' primitive, which is almost always hidden behind the mkDerivation abstraction from nixpkgs. This [2] blog post is an exploration of what exactly that means.

    I'd also love for the documentation situation to be much better, in particular in terms of official, curated resources. But I'm not convinced that you actually need to know the difference between derivation and mkDerivation to make effective use of Nix, because in practice you would always use the latter. That said, mkDerivation and the whole of nixpkgs is essentially a huge DSL (I believe this is what you meant when you said 'config composing config') that you do need to know and is woefully underdocumented.

    > I would love to adopt Nix for developer tooling for Notion’s engineers, but today it’s about infinity times easier to work around the limitations mentioned of Docker+Ubuntu+NPM than to work around the limitations of Nix.

    One approach I have taken to is to specify the environment in Nix, but then generate Docker devcontainers from it, so most people don't come into contact with Nix if they don't want to.

    [1] https://devenv.sh

    [2] https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/derivations/

  • Development Environments with Guix, similar to devenv.sh
    4 projects | /r/GUIX | 9 Dec 2023
    This though, through the use of devenv.sh, which uses nix, as when I got into nix I though it was going to be easier to just make a development environment, not the case. Until I found devenv.sh, I could actually finally make good environments... It also has other features like containers and services, which also help me know that I can get the most of it if the time comes.
  • Show HN: Local development with .local domains and HTTPS
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023
  • Using Haskell with devenv.sh
    2 projects | /r/haskell | 7 Jul 2023
    Here’s getting started with Haskell using devenv.sh:

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nocargo and devenv you can also consider the following projects:

devbox - Instant, easy, and predictable development environments

nix-direnv - A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10]

direnv - unclutter your .profile

devshell - Per project developer environments

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

rembg - Rembg is a tool to remove images background

deequ - Deequ is a library built on top of Apache Spark for defining "unit tests for data", which measure data quality in large datasets.

enso - Hybrid visual and textual functional programming.

telepresence - Local development against a remote Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster

macpine - Lightweight Linux VMs on MacOS

Podman Desktop - Podman Desktop - A graphical tool for developing on containers and Kubernetes

Tabby - A terminal for a more modern age