Non-recursive make considered harmful: build systems at scale

Mokhov, Andrey; Mitchell, Neil; Peyton Jones, Simon; Marlow, Simon

doi:10.1145/2976002.2976011

Non-recursive make considered harmful: build systems at scale

Mokhov, Andrey, Mitchell, Neil, Peyton Jones, Simon, Marlow, Simon·2016·Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Haskell

DOI 10.1145/2976002.2976011

Abstract

Most build systems start small and simple, but over time grow into hairy monsters that few dare to touch. As we demonstrate in this paper, there are a few issues that cause build systems major scalability challenges, and many pervasively used build systems (e.g. Make) do not scale well.