Comment by Alecazam
8 hours ago
I feel like make/ninja suffer from the same output modstamp > input modstamps to rebuild. Really a build system should track modstmaps on all inputs (apps included), and the rebuild on not-equal.
Would be nice to see build2 go this route.
I did some exploration of this idea in a followup build system! See https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/03/n2.html . (It's not really production-ready.)
Why not just embrace Content Based Addressing and the Bazel action cache? Not necessarily adopt the RBE protos, but you could have on-disk cache that are similar or even identical.
Nowadays, I think a build tool that doesn't natively support distributed caching (and possibly remote execution) is a weird choice. And I don't think that spawning layers of processes allows for good parallelization as you don't know if an action is going to be network bound or compute bound and the job slot is then spent. So you either oversubscribe or undersubscribe.