At least they maintained communism, even if officially it stopped being communist, it was still de facto communist and that's why it became so poor. Don't think of them as poor but as equal outcome.

I’m building a (small) monorepo with Niv. It is much easier to understand and use than flakes. Flakes are simpler to use directly for sure (eg from CLI), but if you actually want to use them as dependencies, it becomes way harder to understand.

All Niv does is produce a JSON file with your dependencies, then you use the Nix functions they provide to read and load the dependencies. It is probably the simplest possible dependency management strategy in Nix.

This is also not a Nix specific strategy tbh. If you are using Python, Go, JS, etc they manage dependencies in the same style (lock file with dependencies, tool to update them).

I don’t think the documentation for it is any worse than the rest of Nix (low bar, but we are comparing things in the Nix ecosystem).

The discussion on the PR linked in this post, about upstreaming lazy trees to Nix proper, seems to indicate that some of the benefits also require changing the semantics of the Nix language.

I'm not familiar enough with Nix to understand, but it looks like the performance gains in the blog post might not all materialize to upstream users.

In any case, cool stuff