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submitted 3 weeks ago by mawkler@lemmy.ml to c/nix@programming.dev

Sorry if this is an ignorant question. I love Nix, but as a user it feels absurd that changing an option from true to false in a home-manager managed config file that then gets transpiled from Nix to TOML, for instance, takes like 10 seconds on a decently modern machine.

In my world that kind of transpilation should be instant. I get that there's more happening behind the scenes than just doing Nix -> TOML, but still. Imagine if the transpilation of config files were instant, so you could have home-manager automagically do the transpilation every time you save the file. That would be awesome, especially for programs that support hot-reloading like Hyprland or Niri.

Is this a Nix issue or a home-manager issue? How much of speedup would it yield to rewrite Nix and/or home-manager in a faster language like Zig or Rust?

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[-] quixaq@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I personally switched to hjem, also zig or rust aren't faster by themselves, since llvm can also be used for C++.

this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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