Yes please. After spending way to much time with Ant / Maven / Gradle, I'm convinced they all got it wrong. A build system that doesn't suck is like a unicorn - rumored to exist, but nobody's seen one yet (except Leiningen, people seem to have no complaints about that one).

Google has publically described their build system here http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/08/build-in-cloud-h... (low fidelity) and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qv3fcXW1mg (high fidelity)

Sorry for the late reply. I got distracted by life :-)

So the qualities that make Google's build infrastructure awesome are:

1. Truly incremental builds. By this I mean the build system can reliably detect when something has actually changed and exactly how much it has to rebuild. It then rebuilds only as much as it has to. There are some systems that claim they do this but almost none of them that I'm aware of other than the aforementioned Nix package manager actually do so.

1a. Googles' system does so by forcing all targets to fully specify their inputs and outputs as well as treating all targets as pure functions. No side effects allowed. The inputs determine the outputs so you know if nothing changed in the inputs then the outputs didn't change either. This means all compiles are as close to fully hermetic as you can get.

2. Distributed builds work really well. Building off the fact aforementioned guarantees for build targets. You can also build a very accurate graph of your build targets and effectively distribute all the of building.

3. Build artifact caching. Since your targets are pure functions you can safely cache them for the whole company. When you have thousands of engineers all building the same codebase frequently and the builds are highly distributed and the cache is shared by everyone the chance that someone else has already compiled a large fraction of the code you are about to compile is high.

All of this combines to make builds really fast, really reliable, and really repeatable. Which is kind of the holy grail of build systems when you think about it.

Google happens to have this because they care enough about their developers productivity that the invested thousands of man hours fixing the time sink that is compiling. That and they also build everything from head so they ran into productivity losses from build times really quickly.

Not google's method, but I am very happy with it. Eclipse's automatic incremental builds. Libraries checked in to source control directly.