I mean I think part of the difficulty with understanding/using Nix is that you can do anything with it. You could set up a nix shell with all the dependencies

I mean I think part of the difficulty with understanding/using Nix is that you can do anything with it. You could set up a nix shell with all the dependencies you need to build the libraries, then build them "outside" of nix with something like `nix-shell --run`. You'd then at least have a reproducible environment for running builds. You could alternatively build out libraries to a /nix/store with a derivation and then use nix's own tooling to ensure that the outputted files had no runtime dependencies on other nix dependencies. From there you could freely copy them from the store. In both situation I think you could take advantage of Nix's various cross-compilation support.