ANVL

Anvl is a parallel, scalable and (somewhat) rebar3-compatible build system.

Planned features include:

• [X] Parsing rebar.config
• [ ] Plugin support
• [ ] Build graph visualization
• [ ] Build profiling tools
• [ ] Erlang compilation
• [ ] Git dependencies
• [ ] Hex dependencies
• [ ] Dialyzer
• [ ] Common test
• [ ] Eunit
• [ ] Relx integration
• [ ] Escriptize

Why reinvent rebar3?

We all love rebar3. It is opiniated, compliant with the OTP design principles, declarative, and easy to use. Unfortunately, it has some shortcomings that lie deep within its architecture:

1. Granularity of the build targets. Minimal build unit in rebar3 is not the beam file or the Erlang application, but “provider”. (Providers include compile, get_deps, etc.). This destroys parallelism, e.g. it’s impossible to compile one app while another one is being downloaded
2. Global mutable state. Rebar3 providers rely on the global state, which further limits parallelism
3. Error handling. rebar3 crashes with a BEAM dump on innocuous configuration errors

Limitations

Incompatibilities with rebar3

While anvl strives to understand more or less complex rebar.config files, some things will never work:

• Plugins. anvl plugin interface is fundamentally different from rebar’s

OTP version support

Anvl only works with OTP 21+.

Attribution

This project contains heavily refactored code originating from rebar project, written by its respective authors.