Comment by hamandcheese
Comment by hamandcheese 12 hours ago
Perhaps you should give Nix a try :)
Comment by hamandcheese 12 hours ago
Perhaps you should give Nix a try :)
Nix is centered around the local Nix store and binary caching.
As long as the specific version of Erlang you’re using is present in either your Nix store or the global cache for your OS and arch (at cache.nixos.org), you should not need to compile anything.
And if you rely on custom builds, you can just setup your own binary cache. This is similar to remote caching in Bazel.
Some more details on Nix caching here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/caching/
Nix is enormously complicated, kind of unstable and not well documented.
I get that if you've gone through the pain of learning it you get a system with some very nice properties. But casually suggesting "maybe try nix" is a bit like telling someone who wants to listen to Mozart "maybe try playing a piano".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd still have to compile it from source on nix, no?
On my relatively powerful workstation, Erlang/BEAM takes about 7 minutes to compile.
We're working around this currently by having a fat devcontainer image, pre-built with Erlang inside (from source) by our CI. It chews through CI minutes unavoidably due to how docker layer caching works.
It would be awesome to just download and unpack a tarball, regardless of which distro you're using.