The postmodern build system
Summary
The article presents a vision for a postmodern build system that moves incremental builds to a distrustful, memoized, purely-functional layer. It surveys approaches such as Nix memoization, ca-derivations, dynamic derivations, and persistent workers, comparing Bazel, Buck2, and Nix and arguing for trustworthy incremental builds with cross-machine distribution. It discusses practical implications for multi-language codebases and potential implementation paths.