Development Without nix

-a.k.a. the Tedious Way

nix Training Wheels

If you want to run all of the build steps directly, but still benefit from nix to set up a complete development environment, you can run nix develop. This will drop you into a new shell process pre-configured with all the appropriate build tool releases to run everything directly without nix intermediating (beyond the environment setup).

No nix at All

Finally if you want to build without nix present at all on your system, you will have to configure your development environment with all of the prerequisites.

In this case, the flake.nix and nix-support/ files are the best documentation for how to install and configure the prerequisite development environment, because that is the literal code exercised by continuous integration. Start with nix-support/init-system.nix for the definition of build targets which are defined in packages or the development environment (in devShells.default).

In broad strokes the prerequisites for a non-nix system are:

• For the binaries:
  • rustup (or the specific toolchain specified in rust-toolchain.toml)
  • The cargo, clippy, rustc, and rustfmt rust toolchain "components".
  • The wasm32-unknown-unknown rust toolchain "target" along with the target for your host. ¹
• For the book:
  • mdbook, cargo-depgraph, and graphviz.

Binaries Build Process

... TODO: We want to simplify the non-nix and nix build process before writing this section.

1. None of this book covers cross-compiling specifically, but we note that a benefit of building with nix is much easier cross-compilation support. ↩