It might be possible, but a better approach (and the one Guix used initially, iirc) is to just be compatible with the derivation format (kinda like object files

It might be possible, but a better approach (and the one Guix used initially, iirc) is to just be compatible with the derivation format (kinda like object files in C/C++ compilation). The end result is basically a big dependency graph, so one may be able to write a different generator in front of it. Anyone who has done the basics in Prolog could "logically" pull this off (e.g. some rule requires another rule, or however Prolog works; it's been a long time since I looked at it), but all of the extra stuff in the library (e.g. all of the systemd tweaking, interface, etc) is a LOT of man hours. I heard about Spack [0] on a recent cppcast episode, which seems like a competitor to Nix (but from the supercomputing side of things), but I don't know if they do the OS-level stuff (vs. nix shell / conda / pip / gem replacement stuff). [0] https://spack.io/ https://spack.io/