Build systems with Andrey Mokhov

In this episode of Signals and Threads, Ron Minsky interviews Andrey Mokhov about build systems, exploring their importance, complexities, and underlying elegance. Andrey defines build systems as tools that automate tasks for developers and companies, tracing their evolution from simple scripts to sophisticated systems like Make. The discussion highlights Make's strengths and limitations, including timestamp-based recomputation and scalability issues, and transitions to more modern build systems like Hadrian, Shake, Bazel, and Jane Street's Djanga and Dune. Andrey explains the core components of build systems, schedulers and rebuilders, and discusses the challenges of migrating to new systems, the need for language independence, and the increasing integration of build systems with development environments. The conversation also touches on the similarities between build systems and other incremental computation engines like Excel, and the potential for build systems to automate tasks within compilers for finer-grained incrementality.