Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers
Nix is solving the wrong problems, and I&#x27;m dismayed that it is being adopted more and more to solve those wrong problems. The very concept of a &quot;development environment&quot; is indicative of broken build systems. Ecosystems like python are trying desperately to tame the insanity using venvs, while ecosystems like rust were built correctly from the start with Cargo. Neither of these benefits in the least way from Nix or the most popular alternative, Docker (except that both end up falling victim to the insanity of other ecosystems when FFI comes into play).<p>What Nix could have been was a global un-fscked dependency manager, a la Portage but with Nix&#x27;s special sauce for local environments -- thereby working around fundamentally and permanently broken ecosystems like C, which would be useful even in the FFI case. But somehow it never got around to actually managing dependencies. By failing to manage dependencies (by pretending that versioning doesn&#x27;t exist, and supporting only exact software sets), Nix only re-entrenches the same bad behavior and broken systems which it should have been replacing: i.e., <i>encouraging</i> &quot;works-on-my-system&quot; build environments, by making them part of mandatory collaboration workflows.<p>So, soon: Encounter a bug because the build depends on the environment in some inappropriate, insane way? Then it&#x27;s your own fault for not adhering to the approved Nix build instructions which would set up a system which doesn&#x27;t exhibit that bug.