20 years, is that the compile time now? ;)

Sarcasm aside, here’s a Nix manual from 2004: https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-0.5/manual/manual.html.

(The compile time of Nix itself is unpleasant, but not exactly exceptional among programs written in the modern C++ style. The eval time even for Nixpkgs even on a ten-year-old i5 is annoying but not a terrible problem the way it’s used now, though even on a recent Android device it’s admittedly measured in minutes.)

bpye

With the Hydra binary cache I can quite comfortably update my Avoton C2550 based router or Raspberry Pi 4 AirPlay receiver within a few minutes. It’s only if I need to build a non trivial package that I have to make sure I build on my desktop or in a VM on my MacBook.

mananaysiempre

I doubt your setup needed recompiling the Nix binary itself at any point. Even I did that more out of love of adventure than for any practical reasons, it’s just that the scars are still there. (Still less than those from the time when the LibreOffice build was broken on Hydra and a routine system update jumped right into trying to perform it locally, even if that indeed was what I technically asked for...)

And you know what, the long evaluation thing might just be a bug. Or at least I don’t see any other reason why (e.g.) `nix-shell -p yt-dlp` works reasonably fast on my Nix-on-Droid[1] installation but `nix shell nixpkgs#yt-dlp` takes minutes.

[1] https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid