Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Nix Ninja – open-source Ninja-compatible build system for Nix
Hello, this is Edgar! We are open sourcing nix-ninja, an incremental build system for Nix that leverages dynamic derivations. For those unfamiliar, Nix is a powerful package manager and build system that ensures reproducible builds via strict dependency isolation. However, one of its limitations has been that it builds packages as monolithic units - if you change one source file, Nix rebuilds the entire package from scratch. nix-ninja solves this by bringing compilation unit level granularity to Nix builds. It targets ninja build files, a format for describing build graphs output by popular…
Nix Ninja is an open-source incremental build system that works with Nix to rebuild only affected compilation units instead of entire packages when source files change. It processes Ninja build files from tools like… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hello! This is Edgar and Robbie and we built nix-snapshotter. nix-snapshotter brings native understanding of Nix packages to containerd. We built this because Nix is a great fit for making efficient containers. They don't need an OS because Nix captures all dependencies exactly. However, the current process of creating Nix images is subpar because one needs to transform Nix packages into a format that container runtimes understand. Using nix-snapshotter, instead of downloading image layers, packages come directly from the Nix store. Packages can be fetched from a binary cache or built on the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hello HN! For the past few months, I've been building a Nix-specific CI service, and quite a few people have been productively using it, so I thought I'd Show HN it. You might be wondering why build a Nix-specific CI. It turns out its quite hard to get a really good CI setup for Nix without spending a lot of time or money on it (or both), and even then solutions don't tend to be optimal. Garnix, on the other hand, handles everything, and simply. Just create an account, install the GitHub app on the repositories you want, and you're good to go! Each package gets its own GitHub check, and…
2022 · its alternatives →
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Hello HN! I want to show you MyNixOS.com - a website I've been working on this year to make it easy to create and share Nix and NixOS configurations. Nix is a powerful tool to deploy software in a reproducible way, and with NixOS you can control your whole operating system through a declarative configuration. Starting out with Nix was exciting, but it definitely had a challenging learning curve. This made me start building a website focused on making it easier to create and share Nix flakes, which are the core unit of software deployment in Nix. Using the website, you can create flakes…
2022 · mynixos.com · its alternatives →
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Flox▲375Hey Everyone! Ron here, part of the NixOS Foundation and building Flox. Just coming out of this years NixCon and pretty excited to show hn below :) As of today, NVIDIA officially recognizes Canonical, SUSE, CIQ, and Nix—via Flox—as supported distributors for CUDA. Full blog - https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/developers-can-now-get-cud... This is a huge win for the Nix community. For years, CUDA on Nix was possible but painful—builds could take hours, and redistributing prebuilt binaries was blocked by NVIDIA's licensing requirements. NVIDIA's growing engagement with key…
2024 · flox.dev · its alternatives →
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Hi HN community, I’m Zach, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal that’s easy to use and built for teams. As of today, Warp is in public beta and any Mac user can download it. It works with bash, zsh, and fish. The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive. After 20 years of programming, I still find it hard to copy a command’s output; I always forget how to use `tar`; and I always have to relearn how to move my cursor. To fix fundamental accessibility issues, I believe we need to start innovating on the terminal,…
2022 · warp.dev · its alternatives →
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Fast, secure, configurable. A bold new take on Nix caching.
2024 · determinate.systems · its alternatives →
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This is a project I've wanted to write for a long time now. I really love the ideas from Nix and I still have a ton of respect for the project, but Nix-the-language never felt intuitive to me and I wanted something with more approachable tooling (although this was circa 2016, so I'm sure Nix has improved a lot since then too-- that was before Flakes were around!) Anyway, I started on the current iteration of Brioche about 6 months ago, and I finally cut an initial release. I'd still consider this a "technical preview" version (performance especially is pretty painful, so that'll be a focus…
2024 · brioche.dev · its alternatives →
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Keystone▲125We kept hitting the same wall: you clone some arbitrary repo and just want it to run without any configuration work. So we built Keystone, an open source tool that spins up a Modal sandbox, runs Claude Code inside it, and produces a working .devcontainer/ config (Dockerfile, devcontainer.json, test runner) for any git repo. We build on the dev container standard, so the output works with VS Code and GitHub Codespaces out of the box. Main use cases: reproducible dev/CI environments, self-describing repos, and safely sandboxed coding agents. Our goal is to encourage all repos to…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2023 · flakehub.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I've been taking a break from my big side projects to work on a smaller side project - a tiny build system that's based on what I've learned from using Ninja and ad-hoc Python for my homebrew build systems over the last few years. It's basically a promise-based dependency graph runner plus a simple text templating engine, and it works quite well for the smallish projects I've tried it out on so far. If you find Make crufty, CMake inconsistent, Ninja verbose, and Bazel just too much build system, give Hancho a try. Don't like one of Hancho's defaults? It's only 500 lines - hack it up…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I'm Ron Efroni, CEO at Flox, and today we are releasing version 1.0 of our open source CLI, helping folks manage development environments everywhere.My own experience with development environments began with air-gapped systems, having to actually burn software to a CD to iterate over a very slow and expensive development cycle, sometimes reaching the server rack and realizing I have the wrong disk.... Fast forward to today and there are countless alternatives available backed by incredible compute resources, yet we somehow still find ourselves paying the price of long development…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Bake, A build system for building, testing and running C & C++ projects - SanderMertens/bake
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Copper is an operating system for robots - build, run, and replay your entire robot deterministically. - Home · copper-project/copper-rs Wiki
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi there! I am Edgar and I wanted to share with you “globset”, a Nix library to help specify what sources to include when building a Nix package using familiar glob patterns like “*/*.go”. Nix is package manager and meta build system, in that you glue together compilers and other build systems in repeatable sandboxes like “docker build”. When specifying the source inputs to a Nix package, you typically end up with irrelevant files that when changed causes a rebuild unnecessarily. “globset” provides a concise and simple way of specifying what sources should be included. It is built on…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Darwin kernel (XNU) has been open source since 1999. But "open source" and "you can actually build and boot it" are very different things. XNU depends on proprietary tooling, kexts, and a bunch of open source projects published without a build system. Darnix builds the whole thing with Nix. The kernel, the filesystem, the boot image, all the way to a running QEMU instance. We patched XNU to run on QEMU without kexts, ported HFS+ from a kernel extension into the kernel itself, fixed GRUB's Mach-O loader, and wired it all together as a flake. The build is fully sandboxed. No root, no…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi there! I've been on-and-off working on TacOS for a few months, which follows some UNIX-derived concepts (exec/fork, unix-style VFS, etc) and is now able to run a port of Doom, with a fairly small amount of modifications, using my from-scratch libc. The performance is actually decent compared to what I expected. Very interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Buildstash▲168Hey HN! We just launched open sign up on Buildstash. It's a platform for managing and sharing software binaries. I'd worked across game dev, mobile apps, and agencies - and found every team had no real system for managing their built binaries. Often just dumped in a shared folder (if someone remembered!). No system for versioning, keeping track of who'd signed off what when, or what exact build had gone to a client, etc. Existing tools out there for managing build artifacts are really focused on package repository management. But miss all the other types of software not being deployed that…
2025 · buildstash.com · its alternatives →
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2015 · nixar.work · its alternatives →
- 22FA
I built Fresh to challenge the status quo that terminal editing must require a steep learning curve or endless configuration. My goal was to create a fast, resource-efficient TUI editor with the usability and features of a modern GUI editor (like a command palette, mouse support, and LSP integration). Core Philosophy: - Ease-of-Use: Fundamentally non-modal. Prioritizes standard keybindings and a minimal learning curve. - Efficiency: Uses a lazy-loading piece tree to avoid loading huge files into RAM - reads only what's needed for user interactions. Coded in Rust. - Extensibility: Uses…
Dec 2025 · sinelaw.github.io · its alternatives →
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A cross-platform build utility based on Lua
2019 · xmake.io · its alternatives →
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Rust toolchains and rust-analyzer nightly for Nix [maintainers=@figsoda, @eureka-cpu] - nix-community/fenix
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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