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Comment by yagizdegirmenci | Hacker News Reader

> > It works with your existing build system.

> If I have a build system, or a build system generator, why do I need to redefine my build another way?

There are build systems such as SBT, Maven, Webpack etc, Other build systems such as Bazel completely replaces them, what earthly offers is integration with them.

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The comparison to Bazel here is really not appropriate. The core competency of Bazel is to know exactly the build graph and be able to do the minimum amount of work possible. I don't see how this (basically syntactic sugar over multi-stage docker builds) is going to scale in a large monorepo with hundreds or thousands of developers and still maintain CI build times on the order of minutes.

Here is a small monorepo example. We build a DAG of dependencies between parts of the monorepo and only rebuild what is needed.

This is different but similar to what Bazel does.

I still don't understand.

If you're using, say, SBT and you like it, why do you need Earthly again? And if you don't like it, why don't you replace it if it's possible to replace?

Here is an SBT example[1]. Earthly is starting up the database dependencies, running the integration tests, tearing them down and other glue type things that need to happen when a complex build pipeline has dependencies and several steps.

https://github.com/earthly/earthly/blob/main/examples/integr...

If you use both SBT and npm, for example, to build your full project, then having something to wrap them could be nice. That could be make or earthly or a random script.

Also if you’re using SBT and you do like it, but you want something it doesn’t do, say shared caching. In that case Earthly could provide that but you can keep your existing build config intact. At the cost of added complexity, though.

Ah, now this is a value proposition!

If they would only say _that_ on their front page, I would understand what they're offering me. Well, that, and a list of extra features they offer relative to various build systems.

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