NixOS changes some standard conventions of Linux filesystem layout and where tools can expect to find things. These are for good reasons and are due to the core

NixOS changes some standard conventions of Linux filesystem layout and where tools can expect to find things. These are for good reasons and are due to the core of what NixOS is trying to achieve. For building most things those changes are relatively abstracted away (see ld wrapper script for details) and you don't have to know about them. Fiddling around with something low level like a linker is I think a forgivable situation where the abstraction leaks - it is a process that is inextricably linked to where the system puts things. My issue is the last sentence: So… .. turns out there’s more than one lld on NixOS. There’s pkgs.lld, the thing I have been using in the post. And then there’s pkgs.llvmPackages.bintools package, which also contains lld. And that version is actually wrapped into an rpath-setting shell script, the same way ld is. That means that there isn't a problem. NixOS has fixed this, the system works. Except that you have to magically know which package you should be using. This is the sort of problem that I run into with Nix - it's hard to know the correct incantation.