This is Justin's Opinionated Build System. Currently, it's just a set of notes that I'm making for the sort of build system I want, but I'm going to write a build library and eventually an implementation.
I really like Shake. But, it's been practically impossible to drive adoption for this tool. Haskell has been a hard sell, and it's even a harder sell if just the build system is a Haskell DSL. That being said, Shake is probably where this project will start.
My goals are to build up a reasonable library for defining dependencies, rules, and actions; from there, serializing dependency data into and out of a database; I want to port this C library to Rust, Python, Ruby, Haskell, Java, and .NET; I also want to build a simple build language and compiler that can transform build rules, build actions, and plugin callbacks into executable code. Incremental builds should occur nearly as fast as it takes to load a binary, execute it, and scan the filesystem against dependencies saved in the database.
As a stretch goal, VM languages like Java and .NET should have a daemon service that can amortize the cost of booting these VMs so that plugins written in higher level languages have a lower performance penalty. But, this is significantly far in the future. For now, I want to document the things I want, experiment in writing a minimal library in model checked C, and then set up a basic language and compiler.