Most build systems start small and simple, but over time grow into hairy monsters that few dare to touch. As we demonstrate in this paper, there are a few issues that cause build systems major scalability challenges, and many pervasively used build systems (e.g. Make) do not scale well. This paper presents a solution to the challenges we identify.
... To validate our claims, we have completely re-implemented GHC's build system, for the fifth and final time. The new version is only a little shorter than the old – Make is already extremely terse. Much more importantly, while the original was hard to comprehend and almost impossible to modify safely, the replacement is beautifully modular, statically typed, and extensible. Not only that, but the resulting system has much better behaviour and performance,
The basis of Hadrian, the new Haskell build system as of 2022, https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20220805-make-to-hadrian.ht...