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NixOS
nix
C++2014–2026
NixOS / nix

nix

Nix, the purely functional package manager

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94Distinct people
133Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
18KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Nix, the purely functional package manager

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:59:22 PM UTC.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year133 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-10-11 22:08:41 UTC to 2026-09-26 16:52:12 UTC.

01020302014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 0 submissions, 21 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 26 mentions; 0 submissions, 26 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 1 submissions, 20 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 1 submissions, 16 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21021
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC26026
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21120
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17116
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Nix Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the Nix manual for more details. Installation and first steps Visit nix.dev for installation instructions and beginner tutorials. Full reference documentation can be found in the Nix manual. Building and developing Follow instructions in the Nix reference manual to set up a development environment and build Nix from source. Contributing Check the contributing guide if you want to get involved with developing Nix. Additional resources Nix was created by Eelco Dolstra and developed as the subject of his PhD thesis The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, published 2006. Today, a world-wide developer community contributes to Nix and the ecosystem that has grown around it. The Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS Community on nixos.org Official documentation on nix.dev Nixpkgs is the largest, most up-to-date free software repository in the world NixOS is a Linux distribution that can be configured fully declaratively Discourse Matrix: #users:nixos.org for user support and #nix-dev:nixos.org for development License Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

7 sources
chriswarbo·Jun 1, 2018
This is really cool. I've already got a build machine running hydra, but haven't yet used it as a binary cache. I might give this a go. Ultimately I'd like to see Nix integrate with distributed, content-addressable systems like IPFS (e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/296 ), especially for inputs like tarballs, git repos, etc. It's all well and good having reproducibles builds with the whole OS pinned and checksums on all the inputs, but if the tarball URLs disappear we're still screwed :(
In Announcing Cachix – Binary Cache as a Service
benley·Mar 7, 2018
> You could go down the route of outputting each compiled object file as a derivation... You could, but I believe you would find that Nix becomes pretty inefficient in that scenario. There is a surprising amount of overhead involved in setup/teardown of network namespaces and the other various sandbox features, and that cost is incurred for each individual derivation. It's a reasonable tradeoff for Nix when used as a package-level build sandbox, but (assuming my understanding is correct and still current) for Nix to work well as a file-level incremental build system it would require some strategic changes. Here's the github issue with a bunch of related discussion and details: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/179
In Bazel Fawlty
pxc·Feb 23, 2018
> I suppose it's reasonable that the Nix project doesn't want to host binary versions of lots of old packages to make this use-case fast. In that case, I'd want it to be easy to clone the binary version of those dependencies and source them locally. Maybe this could operate as something like a caching proxy in front of Nixpkgs, that will store my own permanent copy of any package that I access or build. I don't know when it will be ready, but some work has gone into backing Nix caches with IPFS, and it looks like it could be a really cool solution for making it easy to share a cache for 'extra' or 'old' packages without much infrastructure work on the parts of users. https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/859
In Nix 2.0 Released
CMCDragonkai·Feb 22, 2018
My understanding is that you should be using shell.nix for your dev environment, and default.nix if you want to actually build the final "nix-package". I have a gist that talks about this along with python and other language environments: https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai/dcc1b538352624ea690d695... However it's not finished, there are some things that still need work. However package/input isolation is not the only isolation you need sometimes (for example, network isolation, fs isolation...etc). When you do need this, Docker provides all these, but it's not compositional. There's a discussion on the Nix issues about this (potentially working towards a new nix-shell development environment can can compose different kinds of isolation): https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/903#issuecomment-3647447...
In My Python Development Environment, 2018 Edition

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