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[❄️]

Upsides:

• Nix can generate containers as small as Alpine, just adding pkgsMusl when building the container.
• NixNG uses busybox and excludes systemd which reduces image size. Works with Musl. (just import pkgs from pkgsMusl)
• nix2container doesn't write tarballs to the Nix store and allows to skip already pushed layers (without having to rebuild them).
• nix-tree (from top-level) to analyze dependencies and size of container.

Downsides (but fixable):

• Ecosystem immature depending on target.
• Nixpkgs requires bash (12MB), dash's busybox would take 0MB.
• Documentation/manuals/auto-completion/assets are still included [shouldn't be].

Sample sizes for containers on my experience:

• Go ~20MB
• Elixir's Phoenix 41.7MB
• Python Flask 181MB (I don't know why Python container is so large.)