This is a small experiment with a different way of doing rust builds with nix, compared to the already existing infrastructure in nixpkgs.

Instead of building the whole set of dependencies of an application as a single derivation, each rust package becomes a separate derivation that can depend on other rust package derivations.

In order to see it in action building a few select libraries, run:

nix-build --no-out-link test.nix

The downside of this approach is that cargo cannot be used, and therefore some of its features need to be reimplemented in bash.