Ah, I see your point now. However, in practice this is not the case. These hash-based systems scale very well in large organizations. Some more info from Google about Bazel: https://qconsf.com/sf2010/dl/qcon-sanfran-2010/slides/Ashish...
Very interesting ...
Two bullet points jumped out at me straightway:
- Single monolithic code tree with mixed language code
- Development on head; all releases from source
Just one other concern I have now.
Something like Make, or most other build-systems run pretty much straight out of the box.
Something like Bazel lets say is apparently an order of magnitude more complicated. There's a few more moving parts.
My only remaining qualm relates to the additional cognitive load of this stuff. At scale, as in Google this isn't so much a problem because these costs would diminish at the point where you can actually assign people to look after it.
I really like the idea though! Would be nice to work in a place like Google some day ...
EDIT my proposition is that the described build system actually scales poorly for large projects, because you've to maintain an entire tree of hashes! Notwithstanding of course having a helper process in the background to do this for me ...