Building Robots with Nix and Bazel

The importance of overlays when targeting a heterogeneous set of platforms in a monorepo.

We build software for multiple target platforms -- bare metal, embedded aarch64, Windows, and x86_64. Each may require a different set of toolchains, tooling, and libraries, which we provide with Nix via custom overlays.

In this talk I will cover:

• Our motivations for using Nix and Bazel
• The role of overlays in our build system
• A retrospective on what we've learned