Correct, Efficient, and Tailored: The Future of Build Systems

Build systems are used in every nontrivial software project. They contain knowledge of how software is built and provide tools to get it built as fast as possible. While being central to day-to-day productivity, they sometimes fail to deliver their promise of being correct, efficient, and tailored....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE software 2018-03, Vol.35 (2), p.32-37
Main Authors: Maudoux, Guillaume, Mens, Kim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bazel
build systems
DAG
directed acyclic graphs
Gradle
incremental builds
namespacing
Object recognition
Product life cycle management
release engineering
sandboxing
Software
software development
Software engineering
Software product lines
Software tools
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Summary:Build systems are used in every nontrivial software project. They contain knowledge of how software is built and provide tools to get it built as fast as possible. While being central to day-to-day productivity, they sometimes fail to deliver their promise of being correct, efficient, and tailored. This situation gets aggravated with huge code bases and fast-paced continuous-integration pipelines. This article surveys state-of-the-art techniques and algorithms that relegate the occasional inconsistent build, slow execution times, and boilerplate makefiles to another age. This article is part of a special issue on release engineering.
ISSN:0740-7459
1937-4194
DOI:10.1109/MS.2018.111095025