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by IshKebab 57 days ago
The problem is GitHub spends on the order of $100m/year on providing free CI. Nobody else can compete with that. It's possible they could make it shit enough that a large number of projects will say "screw this we'll just pay for CI", but people really like free (and easy!) things so I think we are a long way from that point.
2 comments
zoobab 57 days ago
"Nobody else can compete with that"

My laptop is on all the time, make a WASM slave and thousands of developers can give their CPU/Memory/Disk for build slaves.

Like bitcoin mining, there could be some competition between 3 parallel builds to pick the winner if the output is the same.

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tardedmeme 57 days ago
It doesn't need to be thousands of developers. Whoever owns the project can use their machine for builds, or spend a few bucks a month on a VPS, or find a sponsor to pay a few bucks for them or provide their own machine (should be easy if the project is any size at all).

My theory is that we waste lots of resources on CI because it's invisible. If you can hear your fans spin up you might try to optimize more, even if the financial cost is still negligible. Back when every developer built the software and ran the tests on their own machine, slow-building projects were the exception not the norm. There was also a much faster feedback cycle for changes to the build and test processes.

Tooling around a self-hosted CI workflow really needs some work to make it as convenient as even the very difficult GitHub Actions.

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progval 57 days ago
> make a WASM slave and thousands of developers can give their CPU/Memory/Disk for build slaves

WASM isn't a magic bullet for sandboxing. CI environments assume a full Linux. So you need to either ran a VM (with the attack surface that implies) or a write an x86 emulator in WASM (which would be very slow).

You also need anti-abuse to stop bitcoin miners from using your system. GitHub probably have full-time employees working on it.

> Like bitcoin mining, there could be some competition between 3 parallel builds to pick the winner if the output is the same.

It's a lot more complicated because many builds are not deterministic, you need to store artefacts, build secrets, etc.

Companies like golem.network or iex.ec have been working on this problem for a decade and they are still not easy to use.

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notpushkin 57 days ago
And yet, GitHub Actions are notoriously broken, and serious customers are self-hosting their runners.

Codeberg does have some free CI runners, although I’m not sure what capacity they currently have, and how well it would work out if everybody decides to switch from GitHub today. They do encourage you to pick the smallest runner that works for you, and keep the workflows lean: https://codeberg.org/actions/meta

Or you can self-host your own runners too, of course.

Edit: there’s one caveat – Forgejo Actions are Linux only. If you need Windows or macOS runners, this won’t work for you. But... you could have a readonly GitHub mirror (which you should probably do if you want people to discover your project), and use the GitHub Actions runners for free :-)

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