---
title: "The postmodern build system (updated 2025)"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-postmodern-build-system-updated-2025--t57bcgqul
source_url: https://jade.fyi/blog/the-postmodern-build-system
type: article
source: "Lobsters"
published: 2026-06-02T09:51:59.067Z
updated: 2026-06-02T09:52:28.920Z
tags: ["webassembly", "bazel", "build-systems"]
reading_time: 26
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# The postmodern build system (updated 2025)

**[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 26 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A deep technical exploration of what a 'postmodern' build system would look like — one with trustworthy incremental builds, distributed execution, and no build identity. The post reviews Nix's derivation model and its limitations (coarse granularity, IFD blocking, inner build system opacity), then examines Buck2 and Bazel's target/action graph separation, persistent workers as a pragmatic middle ground, and theoretical approaches like WASM-based execution and deterministic OS-level memoization. Updated in 2025 with a section on Mercury's real-world adoption of Buck2 for large-scale Haskell builds and the practical recommendation to use a Bazel-family build system with Nix-sourced dependencies plus persistent workers.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://jade.fyi/blog/the-postmodern-build-system>

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---

Tags: [#webassembly](https://daily.dev/tags/webassembly), [#bazel](https://daily.dev/tags/bazel), [#build-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/build-systems)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-postmodern-build-system-updated-2025--t57bcgqul)