Escaping from the abyss: Nix, the purely functional package manager

Nix is a package manager which aims to solve the issue of software deployment by introducing what’s called “Functional software deployment model”.

For some of you, that might not be a surprise as you may already have a Python environment configured with all of the libraries used by the script.

But for a lot of you, you may not even have Python installed nor the libraries that the script requires, but it runs…

This is one of the main features of Nix: The ability to produce virtual environments similar to Python but for an entire system.

These environments are reproducible which mean that Nix will always produce the exact same environment, Bit by bit. This means that no matter which machine you’re using, you will always have the exact same environment, forever.

Some of you might start to notice what’s going on. What are those /nix/store/... mentioned when you compile the hello world program?

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