Nix is a great tool for deterministic, and soon properly content addressed, builds. However my experience is that it is really hard to go beyond the trivial usages of nix. I had to compile some C code using nix and I wrote this expression: # A very simple setup to compile C and C++ code { pkgs, system, lib }: with builtins; let inherit (pkgs) legacyPackages; inherit (legacyPackages.${system}) stdenv; joinArgs = lib.