Alternatives
Products that do what Nix Ninja – open-source Ninja-compatible build system for Nix does
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…
- 1
- 2BA
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
- 3
- 4F1
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
- 5FC
2024 · determinate.systems
- 6GF
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
- 7DD
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
- 8MF
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
- 9CO
2024 · github.com
- 10AK
I'm a software engineer who keeps getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it. I recently moved into a Lead DevOps Engineer role writing tooling to automate a lot of the pain away. On my own time outside of work, I built Artifact Keeper — a self-hosted artifact registry that supports 45+ package formats. Security scanning, SSO, replication, WASM plugins — it's all in the MIT-licensed release. No enterprise tier. No feature gates. No surprise invoices. Your package managers — pip, npm, docker, cargo, helm, go, all of them — talk directly to it using their native…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 11CA
2025 · mackow.ski
- 12CR
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 13
A fast, rootless sandbox and virtual resource runtime for any workload, including untrusted and AI-generated code. Daemonless: a real, kernel-enforced container in ~3.5 ms from an OCI image, out of one static binary - getkern/kern
13d ago · github.com
- 14IB
2024 · manifest.build
- 15VA
Virby is a module for nix-darwin that configures a lightweight linux VM as a remote build machine for nix, allowing linux packages to be built on macOS.
2025 · github.com
- 16NN
2015 · nixar.work
- 17DJ
TL;DR: dagger.js is a buildless, runtime-only micro-framework that plays nicely with native Web Components. It uses HTML-first directives (e.g. +click, +load) so you can ship a page by dropping a single from a CDN—no bundlers, no compile step. Why I built it Modern stacks are powerful but often heavy: bundlers, compile steps, framework DSLs, local CLIs. For internal tools, small apps, and edge/serverless deployments, I wanted something you can view-source, paste into a page, and ship. What it is: Runtime-only: no build or VDOM compile; hydrate behaviors directly on HTML. HTML…
Sep 2025 · daggerjs.org
- 18IR
I don't know Rust. Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that. So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well. I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days. It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 19TJ
Hi HN, I built Titan, a backend framework where you write routes and logic in JavaScript, and the CLI compiles everything into a single Rust + Axum binary using the Boa JS engine. No Node.js is required in production. The idea is to keep JS developer experience while getting Rust performance and a self-contained deployable server. Current features: JS route DSL Action system mapped to Rust esbuild bundling Generated Rust server with Axum Hot-reload dev server Single-binary output Repo: https://github.com/ezet-galaxy/-ezetgalaxy-titan Would love feedback on the…
Dec 2025 · npmjs.com
- 20
- 21HM
A developer's machine accumulates tools fast. A Rust CLI you compiled last year, a Python formatter installed via `uv`, a language server pulled from npm, a terminal emulator from a curl script, a Go binary built from source. Each came from a different package manager, each with its own install incantation you half-remember. I wanted a way to declare what I need without adopting a complex system like Nix or Ansible just for a single laptop. The result was a plain old Makefile. I wrote a short post on using Make (along with a tiny bash script and fzf) to create a searchable, single-command…
Mar 2026 · thottingal.in
- 22AB
Hey HN, we're Eliza and Xin, and we’ve been working on Attune. Attune is a tool for publishing Linux packages. Previously, we worked at other startups building open source developer tools that ran on our customers’ CI and development machines. For many of them, being able to `apt-get install` our tools was a requirement. When we went to actually set up APT repositories, we were really surprised by the state of tooling around package publishing. The open source tools we found were old, slow, and difficult to figure out how to run in CI. The commercial tools we found were not much better. The…
2025 · github.com
- 23NA
Nixite generates a bash script to automatically install all your Linux software unattendedly. Nixite prevents prompts and picks the best installation method. Nixite supports Ubuntu-based systems and Arch-based systems. Nixite installs a nixite-updater script to update all package managers and software at once.
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 24NA
Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon. It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If…
Jun 2026 · github.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →