The Recompilation Cycle

In the ceilings vs foundations formulation for platforms, the recompilation cycle is the time it takes to re-distribute to users a new release of your program. For most programs, it usually involves:

1. observing demand from your ecosystem
2. prioritizing over other requests
3. designing a solution
4. implementing it
5. recompiling your program
6. releasing it

This can typically take anywhere between O(days) to O(weeks) but for the most part is O(months) to O(quarters).

It is a key part of the formulation because it dominates the marginal costs involved in running your platform.

Every un-anticipated request from layers above your platform needs to ask the permission of the platform to go through a recompilation cycle.