Indeed, just two days ago I made a derivation for a large binary, which is built against an older Boost (1.58). On most other package managers, this would be painful, but with Nix I just made a derivation for that version of Boost by overriding Boost 1.59, which is in nixpkgs:
https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home/blob/f6da4d02686224b300...