Notes tagged “build-systems”

2026

1. June 2026 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

2. June 2026 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

3. June 2026 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

4. June 2026 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. June 2026 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

6. June 2026 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

7. June 2026 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