[huyegn]

Wow, I just read through the documentation for the Nix package manager and it's a breath of fresh air...Source based builds but with the convenience of pre-compiled binaries hashed with all the input parameters used to create those binaries:

https://nixos.org/nix

Has anyone tried using this for development?

[cstrahan]

Yes, and it has been great. I recently had to diagnose a problem in some software and its dependencies, and I needed a quick way to try different build flags and dependency versions. Nix's deterministic builds (and having access to all of the packages definitions in one location) are a huge help here: it only took a couple seconds of configuring between each build, and I quickly isolated responsible library/version out of a couple dozen deps.