Add comparison chart to documentation covering similar projects

[alerque]

I don't know if I've only started noticing or if the tooling in this space has started to proliferate, but it isn't clear to me which tool to reach for an which project. Recently I've run across nixpacks, riff, devbox, and devshell — all of which seem to try and simplify building and-or using projects by abstracting some combination of nix and docker features. There are likely others I'm unaware of too. Of course this is in addition to lower level tooling like docker and nix shell and nix develop which can be used directly as well.

I think it would be useful for at least one of these projects to maintain a comparison chart that helps flesh out which projects cover which ground and what the respective pros and cons of each approach is to help people make informed choices about tooling.

c.f. same issue on nixpacks, devbox, and devshell.

[infogulch]

See also devshell.

[alerque]

Thanks @infogulch. I wasn't aware of that one. I've added a matching issue and cross linked everything. It probably doesn't matter at all which project hosts such a comparison, but folks familiar with each project should probably contribute so end users can get an accurate idea of strengths and weaknesses.

[hugosenari]

same issue on devenv

[figsoda]

I've only used riff so take this with a grain of salt

• riff is language specific (only rust at the moment) and creates ad-hoc environments inferred from dependencies with no extra configuration required
• nixpacks seems like something completely different that builds docker images
• devbox and devshell seems like a language-agnostic thinner convenience layer over nix to create environments with simpler languages like toml and json. I have not used either of them so I don't really no the differences between these two