Hacker News Reader

Comment by lexlash | Hacker News Reader

Having been down this path - asdf didn’t go far enough in creating reproducible/sealed environments, the quality of the plugins per language varied dramatically, shims made a lot of assumptions about how tools will be used, and you can expect to throw asdf away the moment you need to deploy and then have to build something else.

I don’t like Nix but I haven’t found anything else that scales along those critical requirements. I don’t think it’s a good idea to simply replace rbenv/nvm/etc with asdf-ruby-plugin and so on - unless your software isn’t intended to leave your development machine?

(Docker for me fails in the opposite direction - fairly miserable to develop with but trivial to deploy.)

View on HN

People complain a lot about NPM, but I find it solves all these problems reasonably nicely. It's pretty easy to use in development and it's easy to deploy (either using node_modules in production, or bundling, both approaches work).

Of course it only works if your codebase and tools are all JS-based!

Having worked recently on a project that was mostly TypeScript with some Python, the TS bits were mostly straightforward but the Python was a hassle in both dev and production (I used venv). I can see that asdf might have been handy for development but if it didn't have a good deployment workflow that wouldn't have helped.

Every language has a tool like NPM (actually, nvm in the context of this discussion) these days. The problems tools like Nix solves (and arguably, Asdf) is that instead of learning each language's tools you only need to learn one tool that manages multiple languages and system dependencies.

> I don’t think it’s a good idea to simply replace rbenv/nvm/etc with asdf-ruby-plugin and so on

ASDF generally doesn't reinvent version management, but wrap and re-use ruby-build, node-build etc.

It fails if your single project is a legacy monster needing four versions of node, two pythons and a handful of javas - but that's not a common use case.

More commonly you have multiple projects, each with a single version of node, python and java. For deployment you only need one of each - it's in development you need five of each when switching between projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com