Building packages on nix can be annoying. We want it to be as easy as possible for nim users and nixos users/maintainers.

The current implementation in nixpkgs relies on a custom lock file. But packages are more likely to have an existing nimble.lock, making maintaining or generating a second lock file just for nix somewhat tedious.

There are currently two options for generating this lock.json:

1. Using the recommended nim_lk which attempts dependency resolution to generate the lock file
2. nnl which performs no dependency resolution and simply converts a nimble.lock file (or generates one if necessary) to the equivalent nim_lk output

nim2nix forgoes buildNimPackage for two custom builders, empowered by native tooling.

nim2nix provides two builders: buildNimblePackage and buildAtlasPackage:

Both of which work essentially the same by using their associated package manager to download and wire up deps.

NOTE: nim2nix uses a patched nimble to prevent it from compiling any dependencies

buildNimblePackage {
  src = fetchFromGitHub {
    ...
  };

  # nimbleLockFile = ./nimble.lock;
  nimbleDepsHash = "<sha256>";
}

see example;

buildAtlasPackage {
  src = fetchFromGitHub {
    ...
  };

  # atlasLockFile = ./atlas.lock;
  atlasDepsHash = "<sha256>";
}

see example;