[jonringer117]

This likely wouldn't work on practice. Nix is aggressively lazy, so if you just want a single package, you don't have to evaluate the builds of all 60k+ packages, just the package you wanted and its dependencies.

This just might be me as a functional-programming-maximalist, but I do not like imperative languages for configuration management. You implicitly have to hold the execution state of all actions to know what is going on.

[wocram]

BUILD file evaluation is very similar to nix expression evaluation. I think the bazel 'analysis' phase is equivalent to the nix derivation expansion step

Maybe nix is more lazy, but I would be surprised if nix ends up doing substantially less work than bazel when a single target in a large graph is built.