The <linklinkend="chap-stdenv">standard build environment</link> makes it easy to build typical Autotools-based packages with very little code. Any other kind of package can be accomodated by overriding the appropriate phases of <literal>stdenv</literal>. However, there are specialised functions in Nixpkgs to easily build packages for other programming languages, such as Perl or Haskell. These are described in this chapter.