I've used asdf for years, but recently switched to https://github.com/jdx/mise It's a drop-in replacement for asdf, but I prefer some of the nice features it has to offer.

See: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

Wait, not only is it called asdf leading to confusion, it literally is also a package manager of sorts just like the original asdf???

I just tried googling it having not really used CL in a while, and apparently it was seo'd to the top of google results too?

Having been down this path - asdf didn’t go far enough in creating reproducible/sealed environments, the quality of the plugins per language varied dramatically, shims made a lot of assumptions about how tools will be used, and you can expect to throw asdf away the moment you need to deploy and then have to build something else.

I don’t like Nix but I haven’t found anything else that scales along those critical requirements. I don’t think it’s a good idea to simply replace rbenv/nvm/etc with asdf-ruby-plugin and so on - unless your software isn’t intended to leave your development machine?

(Docker for me fails in the opposite direction - fairly miserable to develop with but trivial to deploy.)

Sounds like nix using devenv[1] also would solve this problem.

[1] https://devenv.sh/

Out of curiosity, how many dev environments do folks use? Is this for reproducible environments shared by members of a team or company?

For a single user with one development machine, simply having say a time-machine backup could be sufficient. I haven't had challenges for personal projects where details mattered. e.g. a Maven pom.xml, or Go modules/packages was sufficient for my needs.

Historically I'd only cared about automating the spec of production environments. Why would I want/need this?

I now recollect once being contacted out of the blue as being a person who might be able diagnose/solve an issue at a company I'd never worked with. They had two dev machines and only one of them could produce a working program. Their team couldn't figure it out. I gave them a rate and arrived on-site. It was a Visual Basic 6 program, so I just took two half days going through every EXE & DLL related to Windows and VB, eventually finding the difference. Tedious but not rocket science. Is it to avoid these cases?

Edit: We have project onboarding instructions where I work. I suppose it could be useful for making those. I don't make them but could appreciate if they used a standard rather than bespoke scheme.