2012/03/13 by Derrick Coetzee, Coetzee, Derrick, Anand Bhaskar +4
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software System Performance and Reliability #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1203.2704
arxiv created 2012/03/13 · openalex publication_date 2012/03/13 · arxiv updated 2012/03/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Reliable and fast builds are essential for rapid turnaround during development and testing. Popular existing build systems rely on correct manual specification of build dependencies, which can lead to invalid build outputs and nondeterminism. We outline the challenges of developing reliable build systems and explore the design space for their implementation, with a focus on non-distributed, incremental, parallel build systems. We define a general model for resources accessed by build tasks and show its correspondence to the implementation technique of minimum information libraries, APIs that return no information that the application doesn't plan to use. We also summarize preliminary experimental results from several prototype build managers.