Nix can be used as a build system in the same way that bazel can. It already has all of the tooling - a fundamental representation of a hermetic DAG, caching, access to any tool you need, and a vast selection of libraries.
The only catch is that no one has used it to write a build system for it in public yet. I’ve seen it done in a couple of companies, though, as using Nix to only partially manage builds can be awkward due to caching loss (if your unit of source is the entire source tree, a tiny change is an entirely new source).
Nix can do it incremental
U could split it into multiple derivations which get built into one package
For rust there ist the excellent https://crane.dev/index.html project
Or you can also go to the extreme and do 1:1
source to derivation mapping
So for example if ur project has 100 source files it could be built from 100 derivations, the language/CLI tools are flexible enough for that
Don't know tho if there any well working smart nix tools which can make it well working /efficient, in theory it's very possible, just unsure about practicality/overheads
Nix is basically merely a quirky functional programming language that generates shell scripts to be run in a sandbox for the actual build. It is not a great tool for within-a-project building; its minimal unit of work has a pretty high overhead.
