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Microsoft's build system is a joke by any modern standard. It's a combination of a tool called 'build' (some version is available in DDK) and nmake. As the end result, since 'build' doesn't enforce dependencies (and as a result can't reliably trace them), they leak, and developers put manual "drains" into build files, reducing system parallelism. They try to upgrade manifest-based builds, but nothing came out of it as far as I know. Automatic incremental builds do not work either.

It took me 12 hours to build Windows in 2001, it's still takes approximately the same time to build Windows now (or so they tell me). No distributed build in sight. I think that across entire Microsoft few thousand man-years are wasted in last decade because of the build issues, and cost of lost opportunities is unmeasurable.

I'm happy blaze user now.




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