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?
To add to the other answers, when I'm experimenting with some configuration a lot, I sometimes change it from being Nix-managed to just plain config file. That way I can try things out in a much shorter loop. When I have the configuration that I want, I port it back to Nix. Not a perfect solution, but it can save some time