Understanding Build Systems à la Carte: Theory, Incremental Computation, and Front‑End Applications

The paper Build Systems à la Carte: Theory and Practice by Andrey Mokhov, Neil Mitchell, and Simon Peyton Jones proposes a general framework that abstracts build systems as a combination of schedulers and rebuilder strategies, enabling the prototyping of new systems with desired properties.

The authors argue that by teasing apart existing build tools (Make, Ninja, Bazel, etc.) and even spreadsheets, one can identify common components and recombine them. Their model is expressed precisely in Haskell, but the essential ideas—key‑value stores, tasks, and a fetch callback that tracks dependencies—can be reimplemented in other languages.

For front‑end engineers, the article shows how the model maps to familiar scenarios: the dependency graph of a spreadsheet, the incremental rendering of React components, and the state‑management flow of Recoil. It highlights that React’s scheduler and Recoil’s selector/get callbacks are concrete instances of the abstract fetch mechanism.

Concrete TypeScript translations are provided for the store, task, and build functions, illustrating how to assign keys (e.g., cell addresses or atom identifiers), define tasks (e.g., formulas or selector logic), and invoke store.get(key) or fetch(key) to obtain up‑to‑date values while respecting dependency changes.

The article also connects the model to module systems (CommonJS, AMD, ES‑modules) and dependency‑injection frameworks, showing that static and dynamic imports correspond to static and dynamic dependencies in the abstract framework.

Overall, the discussion demonstrates that the build‑system abstraction is a powerful lens for understanding incremental computation across a wide range of software domains, from compilers and ray‑tracing to low‑code platforms and modern front‑end libraries.