I've been using unikraft (https://unikraft.org/) unikernels for a while and the startup times are quite impressive (easily sub-second for our Rust application).
I think for a small configuration TOML might be fine. Where it breaks down in my opinion is in larger configuration files. It just becomes pretty unreadable.
Think about a Github Action being written in TOML ... would probably not look great!
We've been working on Pixi, which uses Conda packages. You can control versions precisely and also easily build your own software into a package to ship it. Would be curious to chat if it could be useful as an alternative to `mise`.
We've been building `pixi` and more specifically "pixi global" as a replacement for homebrew, but based on Conda packages. It creates a single virtual environment per globally installed tool (deduplication works by hard-linking) and then links out the binaries from the isolated environments to a single place.
I think this is really cool. We're tackling this problem from the other side by building `pixi` (pixi.sh) which bundles project / package management with a task runner so that any CI should be as simple as `pixi run test` and easy to execute locally or in the cloud.
Interesting project. We'd love to work together for better Lua support in Pixi (through the conda-forge ecosystem). We already package lua and a few C extensions. C extensions are the bread and butter for Pixi, so I think it could be a good fit!
Thanks for bringing up conda. We're definitely trying to paint this vision as well with `pixi` (https://pixi.sh) - which is a modern package manager, written in Rust, but using the Conda ecosystem under the hood.
It follows more of a project based approach, comes with lockfiles and a lightweight task system. But we're building it up for much bigger tasks as well (`pixi build` will be a bit like Bazel for cross-platform, cross-language software building tasks).
While I agree that conda has many short-comings, the fundamental packages are alright and there is a huge community keeping the fully open source (conda-forge) distribution running nicely.
We've been working on all the shortcomings in `pixi`: pixi.sh
It's very fast, comes with lockfiles and a project-based approach. Also comes with a `global` mode where you can install tools into sandboxed environments.
Cool that this space is getting more attention - I just came from the reproducible builds summit in Hamburg. We're working on similar low level build system tools with rattler-build and pixi. Would love to have a chat and potentially figure out if collaboration is possible.