Nix is a pretty sweet package manager that runs on both Linux and MacOS. You can easily create self-contained, reproducible development environments (think Docker, but less heavyweight). It also has an extensive set of binary packages for most popular languages (C/C++, Python, C#, Haskell, Erlang, Elm, etc). As opposed to, say, Homebrew, Nix packages are fully, 100% deterministic, so if you've ever wasted time on cryptic runtime errors due to e.g. upgrading OpenSSL and having the ABI change out from under you (thus breaking everything else you had previously installed), Nix completely avoids that.
I figure with the time it's saved me, it would be a sin not to share the productivity boost with everyone else.
Nix is a pretty sweet package manager that runs on both Linux and MacOS. You can easily create self-contained, reproducible development environments (think Docker, but less heavyweight). It also has an extensive set of binary packages for most popular languages (C/C++, Python, C#, Haskell, Erlang, Elm, etc). As opposed to, say, Homebrew, Nix packages are fully, 100% deterministic, so if you've ever wasted time on cryptic runtime errors due to e.g. upgrading OpenSSL and having the ABI change out from under you (thus breaking everything else you had previously installed), Nix completely avoids that.
I figure with the time it's saved me, it would be a sin not to share the productivity boost with everyone else.