The basic concepts are perfectly reasonable, but the grammar is not what someone would invent today (see: Bazel).

I built Mazel because my grandmother's Yiddish expressions were fading from family memory. Each saying comes with its cultural context — not just a translation, but the story behind it.

Build systems are fragmented: CMake vs Meson vs Bazel vs Make vs Ninja, pick your poison.

It keeps track of dependency graphs, so you can test only affected projects. It can also cache execution of unchanged transitive steps, so you can skip builds tests that were already run previously.

It's designed to integrate with Maven projects, to bring in the benefits of tools like Gradle and Bazel, where local and remote builds and tests share the same cache.

In an alternate timeline where everyone uses Nix or Bazel or some such, docker build would be laughed out of the window.