I've been seeing that nix develop takes a very long time on large projects, and I believe it's due to the whole folder being copied to the store.
nix-shell doesn't have this problem, but I need flakes specifically because they allow to have runtime libraries, which shell doesn't seem to support. (Translating flake.nix to a shell.nix exactly has different execution results.)
What can I do? I've tried putting the flake.nix on an empty subfolder, and it solves it, but it's extremely tedious and clunky.
Yep. There's work ongoing to alleviate this but for now it's a fundamental problem with flakes.
I don't understand. There's nothing you can do with
nix developthat you can't do withnix-shell. What do you mean "allow to have runtime libraries"? That's justbuildInputs, which is the same regardless of flakes.