EngFlow has launched the public beta of CMake RE, a remote execution service for the CMake software build system, along with a new open source project build system. The company has also announced the acquisition of tipi.build.   

EngFlow is a build acceleration company created by Bazel engineers and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, firstminute capital and Tiger Global.

The public beta of CMake RE is a tool for C and C++ developers that provides build acceleration, caching and remote execution. CMake RE integrates EngFlow's remote execution capabilities with tipi.build's CMake caching solution. The combination smartly caches and parallelizes parts of the build to improve the performance. The beta adds improvements including local hermetic CMake builds, build and dependency caching, and build distribution across autoscaled cloud build machines. It can be used for cross-platform building and testing on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. 

The company is also announcing a new open source project, HermeticFetchContent, aimed at C and C++ developers. EngFlow says the project addresses software safety and continuous delivery. 

The EngFlow team points out that compiling and automated testing for Rust, C and C++ code is compute intensive and common codebases can take many hours to compile, generating very large build trees. They say the issues are exacerbated when teams add static analyzers and sanitizer instrumentation to their builds and tests to handle safety requirements recently defined by the NSA, the White House and the European Union. 

HermeticFetchContent is a CMake module that provides what EngFlow says is sensible dependency management and dependable provenance mechanisms including Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). When combined with CMake RE the module provides build configurability and throughput, making use of caching and remote execution to let teams build and run tests with sanitizers and static analyzers.

EngFlow says that on the C++ Boost software libraries, the time taken for building was faster by a factor of between 10 and 21 times. (benchmark details and data available at https://github.com/tipi-build/hfc-bench).

EngFlow has used Bazel cluster technology for the build system. Bazel is an open source build system project designed for use with complex, polyglot codebases. EngFlow and tipi.build have worked to include the benefits of Bazel remote execution and caching to CMake. 

Alongside the new products, EngFlow has also announced the company is acquiring tipi.build. They say this will offer EngFlow customers deeper expertise and more solutions for automated build system modernization and build caching with automated dependency analysis that seamlessly communicates with EngFlow's remote execution service. 

tipi.build provides fast remote C, C++ and Rust builds with caching technology based on CMake and Git. EngFlow led tipi.build's seed investment round in 2022, and the companies worked together to build CMake RE to automate caching and cloud-based distributed build execution.

More Information

EngFlow Website

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