As I understand it, the primary motivation for reimplementing those tools is to tighten the bootstrapping - cycle for new platforms. So while there might many conveivable languages to do this in (I'd personally lean towards an existing, self-hosted vm like pypy or racket), discussing just the language misses the point.
The focus is getting NixOS onto a completely new platform, like "gcc just started supporting it" new. That means no existing linux distro whose tools we can reappropriate. It means manually cross-compiling everything you need to get nix itself running. As an excercise, try to port nixos onto Raspberry PI, without starting from the existing build or from Raspbian. While I find Rust and other new languages appealing, any serious proposal needs to start from the following points: - what platforms does it support - how hard is it to cross-compile - how hard is it to target to new machine architectures - how big is the build-time closure I don't think anything comes close to C(++) for those points. I think the best trade-off for high-level features might be in languages that transpile to dependency-free C, like http://nim-lang.org/, maybe also ultra-lightweight embedded vms like lua.
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