resholve

le, plus of course maps ("associative arrays"). I don't have to worry about portability problems with common utilities, because my scripts will bring along the expected implementations of coreutils, `find`, `grep`, etc. I'm free to use "modern" alternatives to classic utilities (like `rg` instead of GNU grep or `fd` instead of GNU findutils) if they offer better performance or more readable syntax. Polished interactivity is easy to build by just embedding a copy of `fzf`. And while I don't love Bash for working with structured data, it becomes a lot less painful when I can just pull in `jq`. It's obviously got some disadvantages versus an option like Python, but the amount-of-code to functionality ratio is also much more favorable than Python's. I typically use this for scripting build and development tasks in projects that already use Nix (via Devenv— I have some unpublished changes to the scripts module that add resholve and ShellCheck integration) to manage their environments, so there's no special packaging/distribution/setup burden. IME it makes for vastly more readable and maintainable shell scripts than painstakingly limiting oneself to pure POSIX sh, so it can serve quite well as a middle ground option between barebones sh and a "real" programming language as your little script gradually grows in complexity. > if you need external deps - just statically link them and distribute a cross-compiled binary (use zigcc[1] or easy Nim cross-compilation). The deployment story sounds very slick and hard to beat! This is something I might want to try for scripts I want to be easy to distribute on macOS systems that don't have Nix installed. -- 1: https://github.com/abathur/resholve

is a more chaotic and quirky environment: macOS updates break applications or remove APIs more often than Linux updates do, macOS updates nuke configuration files in `/etc`, or blindly steamroll system users (low UIDs), the login shell doesn't manage environment variables or other aspects of the GUI session, etc. These are extra hurdles that Nix has to work around on macOS. But it generally works well and the only real hooks that Nix needs into your environment are some shell scripts that need to be sourced on startup. If you know how to manage your PATH and shell initialization in general, you can do it with Nix. (Additionally, one distributions of Nix itself includes some extra software for managing these hurdles that works pretty well at the cost of a more opinionated and more "invasive" install-- check out "Determinate Nix" if you're interested.) Other than that, it's basically the same as on Linux. Package selection is good, things mostly work the same way. Nix's support for platforms other than Linux and macOS is less mature. In years past, efforts have waxed and waned, but in the past few years there've been some concerted and persistent efforts to make Nix and Nixpkgs more usable on Windows, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. Even native (e.g., not just cross-compilation from other platforms) support for Windows is actually a thing! You can also easily set up "remote builders" to local VMs for Linux and FreeBSD so that you can transparently build packages and environments for those platforms on your Mac, if that's a frequent choice of development platform. Overall I'd say it's pretty good, but I don't personally know much about the current status of FreeBSD. It looks like there are a few hundred FreeBSD-specific packages in Nixpkgs, and there's also a fork of NixOS based on FreeBSD called NixBSD. Most packages include "platforms = [ unix ];" in their metadata, which means they're at least intended to build for not just Linux and macOS but also FreeBSD, but I don't know if Hydra is building binaries for any FreeBSD platforms. If it's not, then many packages may be untested and have small build problems. My guess is that at worst, Nix on FreeBSD is probably slightly behind where Nix on Linux was when I got into it 7 or 8 years ago. At that time, Nix still felt amazing and very worth it, but certainly required a willingness to learn how to package things and fill in gaps yourself to get the most out of it. Consider dropping by NixOS' Matrix community; I'm sure there's a FreeBSD channel. -- 1: https://github.com/abathur/resholve/