It doesn’t depend on additional hardware, but it’s designed to make it very easy to cross compile. The internal Google tool it’s built on also has strong suppor

It doesn’t depend on additional hardware, but it’s designed to make it very easy to cross compile. The internal Google tool it’s built on also has strong support for sharing build servers between devs, and they want to enable that in the open source version. It also doesn’t require a daemon: you can ask it not to do that, so the biggest cost is a JVM warmup. That said, these are really moot concerns: for almost any project where engineering is involved, the cost of having an engineer in the first place significantly outweighs the costs of having as many hefty CPUs as you really need for build. If you can’t get a decent i7 for a build node, there’s probably a lot more things limiting you, too.