From the source
As building software grows more like snapping Legos together, how people find and use those Legos becomes more important.
That's why we are donating $25,000 to the NixOS Foundation and betting on Nix as the future of software distribution.
In software, the Lego pieces are called packages.
A package may be some code your program needs to call (a library) or another program your code needs to run.
Historically, people have used package managers to find and install packages into their projects.
Each language ecosystem has its own package manager.
Replit built and open-sourced the Universal Package Manager to unify this fragmented landscape.
Package managers are a holdover from the old model of programming, when development environments lived on personal computers.
Now that development environments (ahem, repls) can run entirely in the cloud, fetching packages from a central server, unzipping them, and installing them into a filesystem seems shockingly archaic.
The future is instant.
When you press the run button in a repl, your code should run immediately, not pause to fetch packages.
The Nix project unlocks instant repl runs.
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