A few things that are nice about it once you've "nixified" your project
- Locally reproducible CI builds and tests
- Sharable developer environments/shells
- Extremely fast and efficient Docker image generation
- Composability with other projects that use Nix. It's trivial to add dependencies.
- Not dealing with VMs like you do with Docker
There is a lot more if you use NixOS and make your whole operating system functional and declarative, but I think that's more of a niche.
Why is it popular now? I'm not sure. It still has a steep learning curve (and rough edges) but over the last 1-2 years it has perhaps gotten to a point where the documentation and examples are plentiful enough that more people are willing to try it out. Also, MacOS support has improved (but still kind of sucks) and the new flake system is more intuitive than the old nix files.
- Locally reproducible CI builds and tests
- Sharable developer environments/shells
- Extremely fast and efficient Docker image generation
- Composability with other projects that use Nix. It's trivial to add dependencies.
- Not dealing with VMs like you do with Docker
There is a lot more if you use NixOS and make your whole operating system functional and declarative, but I think that's more of a niche.
Why is it popular now? I'm not sure. It still has a steep learning curve (and rough edges) but over the last 1-2 years it has perhaps gotten to a point where the documentation and examples are plentiful enough that more people are willing to try it out. Also, MacOS support has improved (but still kind of sucks) and the new flake system is more intuitive than the old nix files.