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Wow, I haven't been working on projects of such scale, but I supposed that existing infrastructure (make, gcc etc.) is good for large projects.

Does it mean that there's something wrong with the current state of affairs that you have to rebuild your infrastructure for a large project? Or does it mean that Google is so unbelievably great that everything is not good enough for them so if it's important they have to redo it from scratch?

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If you have a large project (speaking from experience with Mozilla here), you discover that gcc has issues (speed, generated code quality, etc), make has issues (especially if you want to use the same makefiles on all platforms; things quickly get very painful), the linker has algorithms that are O(N^2) in number of symbols, filesystems have issues, and your own code has issues. ;)

That's just life with a large project.

The post answer your question: he did this because existing solutions were too slow.

Chromium still uses a gnu make based build system. He did this "for fun" to investigate a potentially faster way. I am very envious, my "for fun" activities never result in something so cool.

IMHO it would be much more productive to use/improve existing build tools. Such as Tup http://gittup.org/tup/

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