[zoobab]

"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.

[tardedmeme]

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.

[progval]

> 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.