zb (pronounced "zee bee" or "zeeb") is an experiment in hermetic, reproducible build systems. It has not stabilized and should not be used for production purposes.
zb is based on the ideas in The purely functional software deployment model by Eelco Dolstra and Build systems à la carte, as well as the author's experience in working with build systems. The build model is mostly the same as in Nix, but build targets are configured in Lua instead of a domain-specific language.
For more motivation on the development of zb, see the early blog posts:
The hello world example:
hello = derivation {
name = "hello";
infile = path "hello.txt";
builder = "/bin/sh";
system = "x86_64-linux";
args = {"-c", "while read line; do echo \"$line\"; done < $infile > $out"};
}