whoever says pacman is enough either have all the time in the Universe to configure the miniscule knobs or have never done serious development with multi-platform/compiler deployments. controlling which compilers are used for which packages in pacman (or any other default package manager for that matter) is a headache. having multiple versions of non-conflicting gcc, llvm, cuda etc is priceless and very easy with brew.
elitism aside, brew is genuinely a good package manager when it comes to imperative ones. I still use it on my desktop arch extensively. ofc, if you have nix, there is really no good reason for it (and I’m not even sure it’s possible).
PS. “but you can use docker” – not if you want to have the same performance especially on GPUs. also have you ever tried containerizing HIP? it’s a frigging nightmare.
PPS. if you disagree with the first paragraph – please reach out or send links. i’d love to learn how to do these on finite timescales of our lifetime.
great! thanks for the reply. one other use-case that crossed my mind is an ability to write simple API requests in the GUI. for example, if you want to automatize a bunch of requests within the app itself, or control the format of its response to requests by an external app (basically tunneling them through your app). not sure how useful it is to others, and perhaps this is more easily achievable by simply writing a python script. but I think some ai companies do have this built in to their web interfaces.