u/Dry-Albatross5726

Hi retro gamers, I am willing to build a site where people can play their favourite retro games from the browser and save state in the cloud, so that you can resume playing in any device any time without loosing state.

I want to gradually roll out new emulators, starting from GBA and J2ME games.

I would love to see in comments which consoles would you prefer most and why.

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a project called Dexfile.

It’s basically a BuildKit frontend that extends Dockerfile syntax while staying fully compatible with existing Dockerfiles.

The main idea was:

• keep the simplicity of Dockerfiles
• but make them more composable and reusable for modern build workflows

So Dexfile adds things like:

• IF/ELSE
• FOR
• reusable FUNCs
• IMPORT for sharing build stages across repos
• PROC for ephemeral process execution
• BUILD and EXEC for advanced BuildKit workflows

Example:

IF RUN [ -f package.json ]
  RUN npm install
ELSE IF RUN [ -f Cargo.toml ]
  RUN cargo build --release
ENDIF

One thing I personally felt missing in Dockerfiles was modularity. With Dexfile you can import stages from external repos/files/images and reuse them:

IMPORT git:https://github.com/org/repo.git#main:docker AS base

I think this can be useful for:

• monorepos
• platform engineering
• reusable CI/CD pipelines
• internal developer platforms
• buildpack/railpack-like systems
• self-hosted PaaS tooling

Since it’s built on top of BuildKit, you still get caching, concurrency, rootless builds, multiple outputs, etc.

Would love feedback from people who work heavily with Docker, BuildKit, Bazel, Earthly, Nix, buildpacks, or CI systems.

Repo: https://github.com/ctryard/dexfile

Bonnie build system is like bazel build from Google, which is fast, correct and incrementally builds only the changes made between builds.

Developers love bazel build for it's fast and correct builds, but they also have an hate relationship with it because of its steeper learning curve, hard to adopt and maintain as codebase grow.

Since teams and organisations with large codebase are the one benefited by bazel, because of its dependency declaration hell, teams should explicitly declare every input that goes into their build.

I believe build systems can be as powerful as bazel but yet easy to maintain as Dockerfile.

So I am building bonnie, which infers the dependencies automatically, so teams create a workflow like in Dockerfile syntax without dependency declaration and yet they achieve the same incremental builds of bazel build

Where I’m unsure (and would love input):

1. How risky is automatic dependency inference in practice? (Feels great in theory, but I’m worried about edge cases + debugging)

2. Would you trust a system where dependencies are implicit? Or do you want explicit control like in Bazel?

3. If you’ve used Bazel / Earthly / Dagger — what frustrated you most?

4. What would make you actually try a new build tool today?