The postmodern build system
43 points by BasicallyEternity
43 points by BasicallyEternity
To me it seems the evolution goes to a merger of build system and version control and it will look very much like a network file system. I wrote about the earlier.
An open question to me is how much of a package system is necessary in addition.
See also: https://vesta.sourceforge.net/, which is old enough that its websites have already been recovered or recreated and disappeared again at least twice, while it still contains concepts that barely have a modern equivalent. Some for good reasons, others…
(further reading: The Vesta Approach to Precise Con guration of Large Software Systems, Vesta User Manual)
It predicts a future where JavaScript is the lingua franca compiler target that everything targets, eliminating "native code" as a going concern.
When I mentioned this at some point, people looked at me as if I was insane, but soit. It would solve a lot of problems and also take decades to get there.
More generally after dabbling a bit with Nix and the likes it seemed to me that they're useful mostly if you deal with compiled languages. In the land of javascript/python etc. the need for something like this seems to be much much thinner.