> The heavy hitters (Microsoft, Google, ...) have code bases that are orders of magnitude larger than what most others have so their needs may just be different

> The heavy hitters (Microsoft, Google, ...) have code bases that are orders of magnitude larger than what most others have so their needs may just be different. and yet I can mostly-deterministically build any of the main BSD kernels + base systems + UI + all applications and sometimes even package them into release media using 1-3 PMake invocations.. (without needing to embed a QT-based configuration GUI to do it).. don't think msft or goog need to build anything more complicated than that.. and i'd wager if they do some other process isn't working correctly.. (side note PMake is much better than GNUMake imho; syntax is more 'shelly' and there are build in looping constraints abilty to dynamically define targets based on variable contents (e.g. define a target 'T' who's target name will be the contents of the variable 'V'), unlike GNUmake's bizarre quasi-lispy syntax and functions) > one-way dataflow constraints definately not up on the theory; this sounds very similar to make target heirarchies (e.g target X is constrained by presence/absence of artifact Y)