chase

Chase is command runner and a (forward) build system. It primarily reads build instructions from a chasefile placed in your outer directory consisting of one or more tasks/chases and then traces all of its dependencies.

Building

Chase uses fsatrace for cross-platform file access tracing. We also support an experimental flag that attmepts tracing with ebpf on Linux and Windows.

# Clone with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/dibrinsofor/chase
cd chase

# Build fsatrace
cd fsatrace && make && cd ..

# Build chase
go build .

Platform Notes:

Platform	Tracing Mechanism	Notes
Linux	LD_PRELOAD	Works with dynamically linked binaries
macOS	DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES	Requires SIP disabled on 10.11+
Windows	DLL injection	Needs both 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs

Experimental eBPF (Linux only):

# Build with eBPF support for more detailed subprocess tracing
go build -tags experimental_ebpf .

Using

see sample chasefile

chase -l
  build    summary: "build main"
  tests    summary: "run all tests"
  hello    --

chase #runs the build task
chase tests # runs only the test dash

chase expects the custom shell declaration at the top of the file. if it does not exist, commands will be run with any reasonable sh (Git bash if on windows)

see ./idea/readme.md for more

Performance

Chase's key overhead comes from file access tracing. Here's how the available tracing approaches compare:

Approach	Overhead	Notes
eBPF	~1-5%	Linux only, requires CAP_BPF
fsatrace	~2-10%	Cross-platform (Chase default)
ptrace	10-50x	Context switch per syscall
strace	50-173x	Debugging only

Chase uses fsatrace by default (cross-platform, low overhead). For Linux users needing subprocess-level tracing, eBPF is available via -tags experimental_ebpf.

Estimates derived from Brendan Gregg's eBPF benchmarks and PingCAP's syscall tracing analysis. See .idea/tracing-sandbox-comparison.md for details.

Examples

See the examples/ directory for Chasefile translations of popular projects:

• Redis - Multi-binary build with dependencies
• jq - Parser generation with bison/flex
• SQLite - Amalgamation build pattern
• curl - Complex optional dependencies