Nix allows me to version way more things than just runtimes/compilers. Additionally this completely prevents me from Erlang/Elixir version mismatch. I use Nix also as my system package manager, so it is like Homebrew and ASDF in one package. Also the idea that I do not need to have packages available globally and instead have them per-environment is very useful.
You can version everything, DB, ElixirLS, Vim, OpenSSL, etc.
No, as Nix is whole functional programming language that is used to define working environment, so this is way harder to grasp and understand, but on the other hand it gives you enormous power as it can be used to:
- define work environment
- define CI environment
- configure deployment builds
- provide “simple” definition for others to run your application (for example if this is FLOSS or you need non-Elixir people to run it locally because they are for example mobile developers)
The last one is interesting, because imagine that you have your release defined in default.nix in your repo, so the user on the other end can do (IIRC, I am on my phone so it can differ a little):
let
my_app = fetchFromGit {
repo = "https://my-repo.url/repo.git"
};
in mkDerivation {
buildInputs = [my_app];
}
And they will have access your application via simple my_app start in their shell (if the derivation is properly written). So this provides way more possibilities than ASDF.
