Dateilager Alternatives

dateilager reviews and mentions

• Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 May 2023

  Dang this is cool! I get why replit went so heavy on nix but I also feel like it must have a cost for them — nix is hard to learn, especially for folks new to development which I know makes up a lot of replits customer base.

  We built a solution to the same problem with a similar approach[1], but that just snapshots any old files instead of doing nix derivations. Nix couples the build process to the content-addressability of the output, which works great if you want to put all the effort in to deterministic builds. We just read files like git does which works great for non-deterministic processes like npm install (tragically).

  I like the idea of the Big Disk style of attaching a content addressable cache, but in our experiments we still found the network latency to the attached disk too high when reading file by file, like when booting a node app, so we’re caching a much smaller amount on a local SSD for each prod server. Maybe replit isn’t as sensitive to read perf from the cache layer, or they have fancy local per-node read through caching within the overlay setup? Regardless, cool!!

  [1]: https://github.com/gadget-inc/dateilager