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Podcast: Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed
Episode: Embarrassingly parallel evaluations (nixcon2025)
Description: Nix offers an unparalleled collection of readily packaged C/C++ libraries, with the added benefits of cross-compilation support and a declarative configuration language. That's why we chose it to manage third-party dependencies for our Bazel-built monorepo.
This not-too-common use of Nix as a polyglot build system for external libraries and tools led us to approach Nix in a different way, both in how we think about it and how we used it. Our usage scenarios seemed rarely exercised an we found several opportunities for optimization in Nix code itself.
At the core of the problem, we had 300+ packages that we...