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Notes tagged “build-systems”

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2026

  1. A Language That Can't Loop Forever

    Bazel's Starlark forbids unbounded loops and recursion on purpose, and gets analyzability, caching, and parallelism in return. Buck2 quietly allows recursion back — and the split shows which restriction is load-bearing.

    build-systems starlark language-design bazel buck2 dissecting-systems

  2. A Little Uncertainty Buys a Lot of Space

    Bloom filters trade a small chance of being wrong for an enormous saving in memory — a bargain storage engines take and build systems, so far, refuse.

    probabilistic-data-structures bloom-filters build-systems content-addressing dissecting-systems

  3. The Build That Restarts Itself

    Inside Skyframe, Bazel's incremental engine — and the strange trick at its heart.

    build-systems bazel skyframe incremental-computation dissecting-systems

  4. The Hash Is the Identity

    Content-addressing in the build cache — content-addressed storage and Merkle trees turn a build cache into a shared resource, so your build is proportional to anyone's change.

    build-systems remote-execution bazel buck2 content-addressing dissecting-systems

  5. There Are No Phases

    Buck2's DICE engine collapses load, analysis, and execution into a single graph — and the decision to rebuild rather than adopt.

    build-systems buck2 dice incremental-computation dissecting-systems

  6. Utils Is Where Modularity Goes to Die

    Module boundaries should follow the dependency graph, not your folder intuitions — and "optimal" can be defined precisely.

    refactoring modularity build-systems software-design dissecting-systems

  7. The Build Is Proportional to the Change

    What every build system is really doing — and the one decision that separates the ones that scale.

    build-systems bazel buck2 gradle dissecting-systems