Building, bundling and CI

History

1970s: Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) (Unix) - LALR parser generator
1976: Make (Unix) - Makefiles
1985: Bison (GNU) - general-purpose language parser generator (CFG -> LR/GLR)
1987: Flex (fast lexical analyzer generator) - tokenise input
1995: Ruby - high-lvl general-purpose language
1999: (Apache) Tomccat - Java HTTP server
2000: CMake - generate another system's build files - used w Make/Ninja/AndroidStudio/Xcode/MSVisualStudio/etc
Jul00: (Apache) Ant - Java Make replacement (needs Java plat), XML
Mar04: RubyGems - Ruby pkg man
Jul04: (Apache) Maven - Java + C#/Ruby/Scala

Capture

2007: Qt Creator / Workbench (Qt) - C++/JS/QML IDE for GUIs/widgets on desktop/mobile/Linux - can use qmake/CMake/GNUAutotools
Apr08: Gradle - Groovy/Kotlin DSL (bundles RN w Metro) (top-down)
Nov09: Leiningen - Clojure
2010: Ninja (Google) - Make replacement, speed up Chrome, parts of Android, LLVM, other
Sep11: CocoaPods - Obj-C/Swift dep man (inspired by RubyGems) and auto Xcode integ
May14: Sbt - Scala (needs Java)
Mar15: Bazel (Blaze) - Starlark (Python) rules/macros - Java/C/C++/Go/Python/Objective-C/Bourne - Android/iOS - (bottom-up)
Feb16: Please - not Maven, pip, or go build - not make - not Bazel, Buck or Pants - no Windows
Apr18: Metro (Meta) - RN JS bundler (customise w rnx-kit) - minify faster
Jun18: Pants - Python/Go/Java/Scala/Shell/Docker - inspired by Blaze - JS help needed (contribute after CLI or earlier)
Nov20: ESBuild - extremely fast JS/CSS bundler/minifier
Jan21: Buck (Meta) - Java/Android/iOS/Other - inspired by Bazel
Mar21: Re.Pack (Haul, Webpack-based) - RN builder
🚧: swcpack (Rust-based) - bundle JS/TS
🚧: Buck2