- select the toolchains and versions thereof for the project
- configure cross-compilation
- allow multiple languages
- co-exist with language ecosystems. For example, rust-analyzer needs cargo in order to understand Cargo.toml. However, it should be easier to fully build the project with Nix
- every module is compiled into a derivation that downstream modules can import. Each module derivation is cached separately so that Nix only rebuilds the changed module.
- Nix can generate a closure for an executable, even a cross-compiled one, to copy to the remote system