I have recently started looking into Nix to solve the problem of dotfile deployment to new OSX workstations. When you get a new laptop, you clone your dotfiles, maybe symlink them to your home directory -- and then what? Nix solves this problem for me by coupling my dotfile deployment with the installation of the related software.
The learning curve has been absolutely tremendous, however. That said, the support on Freenode has been some of the best I've encountered in more than a decade.
Can you elaborate a bit on how Nix helps you set up your user space?
Do you install software with
"nix-env -i package"
or do you have a declarative way of doing it? If you use nix-env, how is that better than
"brew install package"?
I'm not doubting your setup, I'm just trying to use nix for the same thing and am having a hard time finding the canonical way of doing a declarative user setup.
For me the part that I'm saying nix-env -i rather than editing a config file and nix-whatever --read-the-config-file-again isn't really a big deal. It's just a cute tool to author and maintain user environments, I'm sure I could, like, define a single package that just depends on and exposes all the packages I actually want installed and call that my declarative user environment but I'm not sure what that's actually gaining me.
Declarative or not, I'm still gonna get the advertised benefits of Nix like, say, having some confidence that I got all the dependencies specified properly if my stuff builds, easily customizing packages by overriding specific bits, and coping with arbitrary version requirements really easily.
I'm sure someone who's more used to configuring homebrew has a different perspective there, but it definitely seems preferable to taking over /usr/local and rotating things in and out of there as I switch between projects or w/e.
Also, the OS X windowmanager has a memory leak and you have to resart every so often. Yesterday mine was 22GB and after restart <100MB… Nothing to do with Nix, just venting ;-)
This is by far the best podcast Ive personally enjoyed besides maybe Waking Up with Sam Harris. The "old friends" chemistry the hosts have cannot be understated. In the morning!
I'm not saying you can't write software happily in Nim. I'm saying that Nim would be a better implementation if it didn't compile to C. There are lots of things that languages I like do that they could do better.
Oh sure. I'm asking specifically, given that I'm writing software happily in Nim, what potential pitfalls am I blind to? My software is compiling to C and it shouldn't be so I'm wondering what can I expect to actually experience using Nim, outside of Hacker News posts about Nim.
If you can absorb what's in this video, you could probably pick up lojban with little effort on the grammar side. Alas, vocabulary is just something you have to get through.
You were down-voted but I actually agree. I did conclude the article by saying that templates seem really nice for closing the gap on refactoring code that not even generics could wrap up. So the intention was to convey that templates are really a last resort secret weapon. They just also seem to be pretty easy to understand :)
The learning curve has been absolutely tremendous, however. That said, the support on Freenode has been some of the best I've encountered in more than a decade.
https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#chap-package-management https://rycee.net/posts/2017-07-02-manage-your-home-with-nix...