[HN Gopher] Poltergeist: File watcher with auto-rebuild for any ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Poltergeist: File watcher with auto-rebuild for any language or
       build system
        
       Author : jshchnz
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2025-08-05 16:09 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | dataflow wrote:
       | If only life was so simple.
       | 
       | So file A gets saved... a rebuild starts... and now file B gets
       | saved a few seconds later.
       | 
       | What do you do? Do you kill the build and start a new one? Do you
       | wait for it to finish?
       | 
       | What about the race conditions - what if half the build process
       | sees the old contents and the other half sees the new contents of
       | some of the files - do you contaminate the output/cache? Do you
       | even detect it to tell the user?
        
         | brendoncarroll wrote:
         | All of those issues can be solved by doing an import of the
         | changed file into the build system's content addressed store,
         | and creating a new version of the entire input tree. You also
         | don't need to choose between cancelling, waiting, or dropping.
         | You can do 2 builds simultaneously, and anything consuming
         | results can show the user the first one until a more recent one
         | is available. If the builds are at all similar, then the
         | similar components can be deduplicated at runtime.
         | 
         | These techniques are used in a build system that I work on[0].
         | Although it does not do automatic rebuilds like Poltergeist.
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/wantbuild/want
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-08-08 23:00 UTC)