Sorry if this is an ignorant question. I love Nix, but as a user it feels absurd that changing an option from true to false in a home-manager managed config file that then gets transpiled from Nix to TOML, for instance, takes like 10 seconds on a decently modern machine.
In my world that kind of transpilation should be instant. I get that there's more happening behind the scenes than just doing Nix -> TOML, but still. Imagine if the transpilation of config files were instant, so you could have home-manager automagically do the transpilation every time you save the file. That would be awesome, especially for programs that support hot-reloading like Hyprland or Niri.
Is this a Nix issue or a home-manager issue? How much of speedup would it yield to rewrite Nix and/or home-manager in a faster language like Zig or Rust?
Personally, I feel that over time this becomes less of a problem. It was very annoying for me as well, but as you get used to the language and the ecosystem, you get better at it and you will need less rebuilds to incorporate something into your config. And if it's only every couple of days, then I am completely fine with waiting 10-30 seconds for the rebuild.
If I'm trying to brute-force my way through something I usually continue to look for the next possible solution while the system is rebuilding, so it doesn't feel like time-loss to me.