Incremental Builds

Many compiler/tools allow incremental builds. Sometimes, they just smartly cache intermediate results (such as Zack attempts to) but, often, they also take shortcuts that result in different code so that they are faster.

In the Inner Dev Loop, speed is often more important than determinism or correctness.

To support the incremental mode, we need to capture “temporary” or at least non-primary build products and provision the next build of the same artifact with the same files. E.g. an incremental builds kinda creates a dependency on the last run of that action.

Some tools might also profit from a shared cache, keeping the tool running, or suspending/resuming it.

An example would be build systems such as Bazel. So this overlaps with shallowly integrating other build systems.