Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

This looks really exciting and I absolutely must give it a try. Well done! At face value the vision and design choices appear to be great.

I'd definitely write a build systen in lua, looks promising!

One request that I would make of a project like this is to support distributed builds out of the box. Like, really basic support for identical builder hosts (this is much easier now than in the past with containers) and caching of targets. Otherwise, this looks great! Big fan of the choice of Lua, though the modifications to strings might make it difficult to onboard new users depending on how the modification was made.

Looks great, Nix-with-Lua that also supports Windows would be amazing. Two questions if I may

- Does this sandbox builds the way flakes do?

- What is MinGW used for on Windows? Does this rely on the MinGW userland, or is it just because it would be painful to write a full bootstrap for a windows compiler while also developing Zb?

Also, its great to see the live-bootstrap in there. I love the purity of how Guix's packages are built, and I like the idea Zb will be that way from the start

As a current Nix user, what I would really like is a statically typed language to define builds. Recreating Nix without addressing that feels like a missed opportunity.