Make builds in docker by mounting volumes and have your sources, intermediate files, caches, etc. in these volume mounts. Building a bunch of intermediate or incremental data IN the container every time you execute a new partial compile is insanity.

It's very satisfying just compile an application with a super esoteric tool chain in docker vs the nightmares of setting it up locally (and keeping it working over time).

I had a project that had to build for macos, linux and windows on armv7, armv8 and x64 (and there were some talks about mips too). Just setting up all the stuff required to compile for all these target archs was a nightmare.

We used a single huge docker image with all the dependencies we needed to cross compile to all architectures. The image was around 1GB, it did its job but it was super slow on CI to pull it.