The title was a click-bait! This article will actually try to explain five instead of three important notions in Shake.



These are:

RulesKeysValuesThe Build DatabaseActions

This short blog post was inspired by the hurdles with my Shake based build, after the new Shake version was released, which had breaking API changes.



Jump to the next section if you are not interested in the why and how of this blog post.



Shake is rule based build system much like GNU make. Like make it is robust, unlike make, it is pretty fast and supports dynamic build dependencies.



But you knew all that already, if you are the target audience of this post, since this post is about me explaining to myself by explaining to you, how that build tool, I used for years, actually works.



Although I used it for years, I never read the paper or wrapped my head around it more than absolutely necessary to get the job done.



When Shake was updated to version 0.16.x, the internal API for custom rules was removed. Until then I w…