POCO VS nixpkgs

You can also look into Poco https://pocoproject.org/

I can't say enough good stuff about POCO for this type of work - when I first got my teams using it we used to joke that POCO was what Boost wants to be when it grows up. And nlohmann/json - cracking library for working with JSON in C++.

We use https://github.com/pocoproject/poco in most projects, very easy to set up a http listener

Did someone used Poco's Net Library to create a Rest Api? Poco Project

But CLion is so slow. Tested with Poco C++ standard build (https://pocoproject.org/). Moving around with Go To Definition takes sometimes up to 20 seconds if file is first touched. Using 'back' and 'forward' delays for 1-2 seconds.

Yes, you need NetSSL - take a look at find_package(Poco REQUIRED COMPONENTS ... NetSSL) requires an aditional find_package(OpenSSL) since poco-10.

poco (portable components) https://pocoproject.org/

I just switched away from it again after it got delisted from nixpkgs due to lack of development[0][1]

[0] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&from=0&size=...

[1] Should be this one https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205

The source code is retrieved from the official source of the package, and checked against a hash that is stored in the package definitions. All the package definitions are stored in a large github repository, and they are "code reviewed".

For example, you can see where the xz sources get pulled from in the src section here:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.05/pkgs/tools...

As usual, wherever you get your software, if someone at the source sneaks in something malicious and no one notices it it gets in there. NixOs has no special mitigations against that (AFAIK).

But you can be reasonably sure that the binary you have matches the official source of the software, with maybe some reviewed patches to get it to work in Nix's environment.

The binaries are cached, so you don't have to build everything yourself. There is a command to rebuild the software from source yourself. Most packages are reproducible, about 95% of the distributed gnome version:

Noticed it wasn't on Nixpkgs, so... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/399843

https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd This is a very cool project that I hope will get upstreamed into NixOS proper, eventually.

I always thought InitWare would be good for that. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/26850 --- we've been discussing this before NixBSD existed, even!

If you are currently involved in managing packages for a Linux distribution, then you might want to use the instructions outlined in the GitHub repo to help you build packages for your distributions. My colleague James Ward has recently done this for NixOS (you can see his PR here)