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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

You can use it on WSL1 and WSL2 but you can't use it natively on Windows. I used it on WSL2 just this afternoon and it was seamless but that makes sense because WSL2 is basically just a Linux VM anyway.

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Although I don't see why it wouldn't work on Windows natively. Sure, it would probably need a complete reimplementation to replace all the POSIX stuff with Windows stuff, but fundamentally it ought to be possible?

Sure in theory but there are a few open bugs:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2651 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2292 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1203

There's a locking issue with SQLite and the Sandbox has some namespace issues where Linux and Windows behave differently. I don't know how eager they are to make it work on Windows either, but at least WSL works :)

The biggest issue IIRC is that Bash doesn't play well with Windows. Things like paths are handled different enough to cause lots of breakage. We could rewrite all of the Bash in Perl or Python, which has better cross-platform support, but that's a lot of work.

That said, there have been attempts to get native Windows support:

https://github.com/volth/nix-windows/commits/windows

Why rely on bash? Windows has Powershell and symlinks, what else is needed to create a nix-style package manager for Windows?

I'm not saying it's a good idea, I don't think anyone would really want that, but it could be done.

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