riff VS devbox

Dependency inference for Rust packages using the Riff registry and python projects

- Dependency inference for Rust packages using the [Riff](https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/riff) registry and python projects

In this language context specifically, if one wanted to manage their workspace with Nix I would reach for Riff and/or oxalica/rust-overlay first, since they are deliberately more aware of Rust-specific nuance. In the latter's case it has compatibility paths with rustup-toolchain files as well, for allowing your peers who can't or won't adopt Nix to continue to feel like first-class participants in the project. Another alternative I don't have experience with would be nix-community/fenix.

Seems to have spiritual overlap with what I understand the goals of Riff to be. Both projects are early stage and not able to cover every language ecosystem yet.

No, I wouldn't say that's obvious. Riff doesn't need 100% buy-in from all Rust maintainers because not all Rust projects have external dependencies. But what we've found in our research on the crate ecosystem is that there are particularly busy "nodes" in the dependency graph. Each time a busy "node" with external dependencies adds a few lines to Cargo.toml, that un-breaks a number of downstream project builds. Our internal registry is pretty small but even that has substantially increased the % of projects in which riff run cargo build works without issue. It's an asymptotic approach and we're confident that sufficient awareness could get us pretty darned close.

We currently have a hard-coded [registry](https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/riff/blob/main/registry/registry.json) of some known per-crate dependencies. But the goal is less to hard-code ever more dependencies and more to convince maintainers to explicitly [declare dependencies](https://github.com/determinateSystems/riff#how-to-declare-package-inputs) in their `Cargo.toml` under `package.metadata.riff`. Because Riff uses `cargo metadata` for the entirety of the crate dependency graph, explicit dependency declarations actually benefit downstream crates as well.

Before I went on my Christmas vacation last year I wrote an article on how I use Nix in my Elm projects. At the time, I was pleased with my set up. However, not even a month would go by before my satisfaction was questioned. In early January, Carlo Ascani asked a question, on the Elm Discourse, about his Umbra project. I decided to explore his project and I soon discovered two files, devbox.json and devbox.lock, I had never seen before. This piqued my curiosity and I had to learn more. I followed the link to the Devbox website and feverishly read the docs. I... was... hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and it seemed to fit my use cases really well.

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).