[throwaway894345]

> Nix is a package manager, not a build tool. It's never been in-scope for it to figure out how to invoke a particular compiler or linker. All it can do is make it easier for you to invoke another build tool, of which there are quite a few.

I agree that Nix is focused on package management and not building, and that’s a bummer because Nix is perfectly capable technically. In particular, Nix can trivially invoke a compiler or linker; its issues are that it assumes that it will only be used by a relatively small number of package maintainers instead of a much larger number of developers, so it prefers to be novel and innovative instead of familiar and straightforward. This makes it really hard to get developers to buy in, but there’s no technical reason why it can’t be used as a build system.

> I would not recommend the use of autotools in new projects, but in my experience CMake with Ninja is fine for distro maintainers to deal with — All other modern build tools I've seen are roughly the equivalent of it. If you find that it's hard to get over the hump with that, then I hate to say it but I don't think solutions will come easily elsewhere on any OS or platform. The state of things on free software operating systems is constantly improving but for now it's something you have to get used to. There are no silver bullets here.

The silver bullets are getting away from the C ecosystem to the greatest extent possible, otherwise you will have to build way more autotools and CMake projects and this isn’t a good use of anyone’s time. As fun as C is, for most applications, we have better alternatives nowadays. They aren’t perfect, but they let you move a lot faster especially with respect to building software.