Yes, that's true. I'm still noodling on that, primarily to enable parallel builds. Outside of parallel builds, however, I actually prefer an explicit sequence

Yes, that's true. I'm still noodling on that, primarily to enable parallel builds. Outside of parallel builds, however, I actually prefer an explicit sequence of steps to so-called "declarative syntax". The frequency with which I find bugs in the dependency graph of `Makefile`s [1][2][3] suggests that people are starting from a sequence of commands anyway. And it's better for the reader as well to see the commands laid out in order, when they need to debug breakage on their setup. People should stop pretending to be Vulcans and just write a script for building their project, and then sprinkle in `older_than` directives as an optional optimization. Building from scratch should be the case to optimize for readability, rather than some exceptional situation. [1] https://github.com/zetavm/zetavm/commit/4e5e2e9d8b https://github.com/zetavm/zetavm/commit/4e5e2e9d8b [2] https://github.com/tekknolagi/stackx/commit/5999202423 https://github.com/tekknolagi/stackx/commit/5999202423 [3] Fun fact: when you try to build OpenBSD's userland from source, the top-level Makefile always unconditionally calls `make clean`. I've seen this pattern a few times: large projects find themselves up shit creek in the build system, and it's difficult enough to test and debug the dependency graph that they give up all performance and retreat to just recompiling everything, just to be safe.