Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed
by Too on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @12:37AM
(#37492250)
Dependency graph is a feature of the build system with better understanding of the language import rules than the CI system can have (or whatever terminology you want to use). Good ones can hermetically, concurrently and deterministic build only the files that were changed.
Earthly is just a thin wrapper on top of docker multi stage builds[1]. Such docker layers are one-dimensional, meaning if one of the steps are calling “make”, that step will have to rebuild that entire layer, not just the one c++ file that changed. There are solutions to this with --mount,type=cache but they take away the reproducibility and and are equally possible with plain dockerfiles.
[1] tbh I don’t know if this is the case, but that’s how others explain it. This is core problem with Earthly. They don’t say how it works, just that you will magically get 20x faster. Without understanding how, I don’t know how to take that seriously and I can only assume it’s snake oil.
Earthly is just a thin wrapper on top of docker multi stage builds[1]. Such docker layers are one-dimensional, meaning if one of the steps are calling “make”, that step will have to rebuild that entire layer, not just the one c++ file that changed. There are solutions to this with --mount,type=cache but they take away the reproducibility and and are equally possible with plain dockerfiles.
[1] tbh I don’t know if this is the case, but that’s how others explain it. This is core problem with Earthly. They don’t say how it works, just that you will magically get 20x faster. Without understanding how, I don’t know how to take that seriously and I can only assume it’s snake oil.