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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in a large Nix dev environment, the difficulty in understanding what was going on meant devops were needed for the simplest changes. Ended up being a blocker for every project I was on. Love the idea but really really dislike it in practice. NixOS is cool though.

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With the naivety of someone who's never worked in _any_ large dev environment: I would guess for that to work (at this point, at least) every team would need either someone who knows Nix on the team, or at least on-demand access to someone floating?

I feel like ~proficiency with Nix has is a bit of a superpower as a developer. It's an incredible lever. But I have no delusions about how hard some "easy" things are, especially around language ecosystems with their own package managers. And learning it is a good bit of work.

Yeah the env I worked in was managed by some of the core Nix devs so they went in 100% and used all of the cutting edge features. It ended up being utter magic to me and most others I know. Tens of thousands of lines of Nix code so trying to add a library to the build was practically impossible, some of the code was hidden in private repos because it was confidential etc but other repos imported it… gah!

I think one of the reasons it feels like this is with Nix, the guts of what people are setting up are all exposed, right there in robust code. You see what's going in to the sausage.

In comparison, I've worked in projects which distribute their components as .deb packages, and the difference is night and day, the latter being a nightmare of laborious manual steps and funny tools. To a user of a .deb file this is all opaque, but let me assure you the complexity is most certainly there in spades.

Shopify is a shop with about 1000 developers who use Nix on MacBooks. Here’s a video on one of their internal tools which is basically just a bit of chrome on top of Nix to run anything without installing it: https://youtu.be/VUM3Km_4gUg

This is the type of costs-and-benefits "it's not for me" I can get behind.

(I left another comment about as a Nix user I don't mind it not being popular, but I do mind people complaining about the costs and ignoring whatever benefits might lie on the other side, as if all technology is reducible to its learning curves.)

Also having worked in a large Nix dev environment, I find it quite intuitive to use and the reproducibility is a great way to ensure your bugs aren't caused by an incorrectly set environment variable or something random like that. It does get a bit annoying when you need a package not available in nixpgs but thats true of any build system

This matches my experience.

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