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A comment on Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments. Parent comment

Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by ndrpnt on Sunday December 14, 2025 @08:34AM (#46262903)
I'd say it's somewhere in between. Sure it's marketed in the CI space, but to me the selling point of Dagger is not so much "write your GitHub workflows/GitLab CI in JavaScript" but "local exec, sandboxing, determinism, and fine-grained (remote) caching for mere mortals". So comparing it to Bazel/Buck2 is reasonable.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by esafak on Sunday December 14, 2025 @08:36AM (#46262914)
I wouldn't because build systems like Bazel are declarative and dagger is imperative. I accidentally created a build system in dagger and saw the difference; the code based way was highly branched, and thus unwieldy. I think you would want to call bazel from dagger to handle the build step.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by mxey on Sunday December 14, 2025 @10:15AM (#46263616)
Dagger uses BuildKit. all your “imperative” code does it assemble a graph that’s gonna be executed by BuildKit in dependency order.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by Too on Sunday December 14, 2025 @11:12AM (#46264087)
But that dependency order is usually just one big blob of ”COPY src/ . + RUN make”, within that block you have none of the benefits. Bazel/Buck has much finer awareness down to every individual file.

Out of curiosity, would it be feasible to take a big cmake project and generate thousands of compile rules into dagger and use it as a substitute for make with sandboxing? I’ve never seen builkit used with such many nodes, how would it fare?

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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by shykes on Sunday December 14, 2025 @12:39PM (#46264968)
Dagger is a declarative DAG engine. So, yes, you can do that.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by mxey on Sunday December 14, 2025 @01:16PM (#46265346)
There is an overhead per container launched so it would probably not be worth it.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by esafak on Sunday December 14, 2025 @10:18AM (#46263640)
Yes, but that does not help you build declaratively in dagger, does it? I would like to see an example of how to do so, if you have one.
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Re:Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev enviro... by justincormack on Sunday December 14, 2025 @09:04AM (#46263044)
Its not as fine grained as bazel/buck. That doesnt necessarily matter.
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