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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

"Build on request" is a good idea. We do something similar in our stack: tup[0] as the (insanely fast) build system, and developer VMs run mitmproxy[1] on port 8080 which runs tup before every request.

I prefer this style of a setup to coupling them together a-la Harp. If the webserver doesn't work out, I can swap it out. Same with the build system. Tying them together makes me antsy. And for good reason I think: since 2004, we have switched from Apache -> Lighttpd -> Nginx, and have switched from custom shell scripts -> Make -> Tup (with some fabricate.py, and with calls out to other build systems like Leiningen)

[0] http://gittup.org/tup/

[1] http://mitmproxy.org/

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As a sidenote, I appreciate the sense of humor that the tup author has:

"In a typical build system, the dependency arrows go down. Although this is the way they would naturally go due to gravity, it is unfortunately also where the enemy's gate is. ... In tup, the arrows go up. This is obviously true because it rhymes."

"<diagram of tup vs make> See the difference? The arrows go up."

http://gittup.org/tup/tup_vs_mordor.html

It is not a reference to Ender's Game and "the enemy is always down"?

I thought the arrow thing could have been a lot clearer. On the other hand, Tup vs the Eye of Sauron is both beautiful art and perfect test case.

I don't see this as tying it to the web server. You're not using some custom language that only Harp supports. If you need to switch to a completely static site, you can still use Harp to generate the static site. If you can't use Harp at all, there are several other static generators out there that support those formats.

cool. tup looks sweet.

Yes, the lazy compile (JIT) or "build on request" as you put it plays a huge factor when it comes to performance. Because it doesn't rebuild the world each time there is a change it is able to expend the cpu cycles when it matters most.

Under the hood we have the HTTP and the precompiling system decoupled. The precompiling is done with a library called Terraform which acts as a uniform source agnostic compiler. Harp wraps this with a HTTP layer and and SSG layer. See https://github.com/sintaxi/terraform

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