Programmability

In the introduction, we saw an example with tasks being the unit of incremental computation, and the context providing a way to create dynamic dependencies that enable incrementality. Those two concepts, Task and Context, are the core of a programmatic incremental build system which we will implement in this chapter.

We will continue with the following steps in the next two sections:

1. Create the Task and Context API, forming the core of the build system.
2. Create a non-incremental Context implementation and test it against Task implementations, to get a feeling for the API without the complexities of incrementality.