Signals & Threads - Build Systems

Welcome to Signals & Threads, in-depth conversations about every layer of the tech stack, from Jane Street. Today, I'm going to have a conversation with Andrey Mokhov about build systems. Build systems are an important but I think poorly understood and often unloved part of programming. Developers often end up with only a hazy understanding of what's going on with their build system learning just enough to figure out what arcane invocation they need to get the damn thing working and then stop thinking about it at that point, and that's a shame because build systems matter a lot to our experience as developers. A lot of what underlies a good developer experience really comes out of the build system that you use and also there's a lot of beautiful ideas and structure inside of build systems. Sadly, a lot of that beauty is obscured by a complex thicket of messy systems of different kinds and a complicated ecosystem of different build systems for different purposes, and I'm hoping that ...