[greener_grass]

Everyone says they want a "tiny" "minimal" "lean" build-system, but there is lots of real complexity in these areas:

- Cross-compilation and target platform information

- Fetching dependencies

- Toolchains

I'm not sure a system that solves these would still be considered minimal by most, but those are table-stakes features in my view.

If you don't need these things, maybe stick with Make?

[crabbone]

I believe that the biggest problem is that different "compilers" do different amount of work. In the race to win the popularity contest many, and especially newer languages offer compilers packaged with "compiler frontend", i.e. a program that discovers dependencies between files, links individual modules into the target programs or libraries, does code generation etc. This prevents creation of universal build systems.

I.e. javac can be fed inputs of individual Java source files, similar to GCC suite compilers, but Go compiler needs a configuration for the program or the library it compiles. Then there are also systems like Cargo (in Rust) that also do part of the job that the build system has to do for other languages.

From a perspective of someone who'd like to write a more universal build system, encountering stuff like Cargo is extremely disappointing: you immediately realize that you will have to either replace Cargo (and nobody will use your system because Cargo is already the most popular tool and covers the basic needs of many simple projects), or you will have to add a lot of work-arounds and integrations specific to Cargo, depend on their release cycle, patch bugs in someone else's code...

And it's very unfortunate because none of these "compiler frontends" come with support for other languages, CI, testing etc. So, eventually, you will need an extra tool, but by that time the tool that helped you to get by so far will become your worst enemy.

[fire_lake]

I have seen this first hand with Bazel. You have lots of Bazel rules that are partial reimplementations of the language specific tooling. It usually works better - until you hit a feature that isn’t supported.

[foota]

I think the idea for these words here is more about preferring speed over remote execution and large build caching type of features, but not limiting the subset of toolchain functionality etc.,. In theory if you scoped your build tool to only support builds of sufficiently small size you can probably remove a lot of complexity you have to deal with otherwise.

[mikepurvis]

Intelligent caching is also table-stakes though. It requires a detailed dependency graph and change tracking, and that's not something that can simply be relegated to a plugin— it's fundamental.

[greener_grass]

I agree, yet Make, CMake or even Node package scripts are more popular than Bazel.

[mikepurvis]

Right, and I think that's a combination of a few factors— first of all, there's the basic momentum that CMake is widely known and has a huge ecosystem of find modules, so it's a very safe choice— no one got fired for choosing https://boringtechnology.club

But bigger than that is just that a lot of these build system and infrastructure choices are made when a project is small and builds fast anyway. Who cares about incremental builds and aggressive caching when the whole thing is over in two seconds, right? Once a project is big enough that this starts to be a pain point, the build system (especially if it's one like CMake that allows a lot of undisciplined usage) is deeply entrenched and the cost of switching is higher.

Choosing technologies like Nix or Bazel can be seen as excessive upfront complexity or premature optimization, particularly if some or all of the team members would have to actually learn the things— from a manager's point of view, there's the very real risk that your star engineer spends weeks watching tech talks and yak shaving the perfect build setup instead of actually building core parts of the product.

Ultimately, this kind of thing comes back to the importance of competent technical leadership. Infrastructure like build system choice is important enough to be a CTO call, and that person needs to be able to understand the benefits, to weigh activation costs against the 5-10 plan for the product and team, and be able to say "yes, we plan for this thing to be big enough that investing in learning and using good tools right now is worth it" or "no, this is a throwaway prototype to get us to our seed money, avoid any unnecessary scaffolding."

[AlphaSite]

If it doesn’t have those features then why would I even use it at all? Remote build and caching are the entire reason I’d even think about it.