user5264: I tried to look for this but I didn't find anything specifically explaining why this fixes errors when launching Plutus Playground locally, although I definitely found instructions on how to go over the errors themselves. At some point I read somewhere it is related to the garbage collector. Could someone expand a little bit on this?
Thanks!

user6044: GC_DONT_GC=1 disables the boehm garbage collector in nix. There are edge cases that our nix expressions can hit, which cause nix to segfault. Disabling the garbage collector in nix "fixes" this. It's not the best solution, but a workaround.  The proper fix would be to fix nix's use of the boehm garbage collector. That however is said much easier than actually done.
So GC_DONT_GC=1 is a workaround for now, until a better nix release is widely available that doesn't need that environment variable anymore.
This also has nothing to do directly with Plutus or Haskell. It's only needed for the evaluation of the build instructions via nix.

5264: <p>I tried to look for this but I didn't find anything specifically explaining why this fixes errors when launching Plutus Playground locally, although I definitely found instructions on how to go over the errors themselves. At some point I read somewhere it is related to the garbage collector. Could someone expand a little bit on this?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
 6044: <p><code>GC_DONT_GC=1</code> disables the boehm garbage collector in <code>nix</code>. There are edge cases that our nix expressions can hit, which cause <code>nix</code> to segfault. Disabling the garbage collector in <code>nix</code> &quot;fixes&quot; this. It's not the best solution, but a workaround.  The proper fix would be to fix <code>nix</code>'s use of the boehm garbage collector. That however is said <em>much</em> easier than actually done.</p>
<p>So <code>GC_DONT_GC=1</code> is a workaround for now, until a better <code>nix</code> release is widely available that doesn't need that environment variable anymore.</p>
<p>This also has nothing to do directly with Plutus or Haskell. It's only needed for the evaluation of the build instructions via <code>nix</code>.</p>
