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Google has unlimited resources. Cores and codebase size don't matter to them. Only concern is what's on the critical path, e.g. final link step. It's very rare for builds to not be incremental. AFAIK JavaScript is the only language that can't be compiled incrementally. Probably the only engineers who would need to run a build solely on local hardware are ones that help support open source tools.

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Js can and does get compiled incrementally if people do it correctly. It's fully supported by blaze. It's just that a bunch of old codebases globbed everything, so it appeared no incremental.

Is that with the js_binary/library rules or something new? Last time I checked, all the work that goes into compiling the JS sources and minifying them into a single "binary" blob happens in the js_binary definition, and the js_library definitions traditionally served only to construct a total ordering of raw source source file dependencies.

Two partial answers: there's a newer better thing thats now the default and splits the building, but even under old js_library, there were some gains from not globbing everything together...

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