Some of the many caches that can be used to make build systems evaluate faster.

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Garn, an alternative Nix frontend using TypeScript, achieves dramatic evaluation speedups through trace-based caching techniques. By tracking file reads and imports during evaluation, garn invalidates caches only when actual dependencies change, reducing evaluation time from ~800ms to ~16ms in unchanged scenarios. The system uses memoization and partial evaluation strategies to cache expensive computations incrementally, achieving 2-7% of traditional Nix evaluation times while maintaining determinism through a pure TypeScript runtime with controlled side effects.

Garnix Blog: Forwardly-evaluated build systems