ZuriHac 2016 - Meet Hadrian: A New Build System for GHC

A Google TechTalk, July 22, 2016, presented by Andrey Mokhov ABSTRACT: Most build systems start small and simple, but over time grow into hairy monsters that few dare to touch. Our favourite Glasgow Haskell Compiler is no exception. As we'll see in this talk, 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. We use functional programming to design abstractions for build systems and overcome these challenges. I'll introduce a new build system for GHC, called Hadrian, that we engineered using these abstractions. The result is more scalable, faster, and spectacularly more maintainable than its Make-based predecessor. You can find more details in this paper: https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/andrey.mokhov/Hadrian.pdf Hadrian is still under active development: https://github.com/snowleopard/hadrian https://wiki.haskell.org/ZuriHac2016