HPSF Conference 2025

Binary package managers allow for the fast installation of binary artifacts, but limit configurability to ensure compatibility between binaries due to rigid ABI requirements. Source package managers allow for more flexibility in building software, since binaries are compiled on demand, but compilation can take a considerable amount of time. Spack has existing a mechanism for mixing source and precompiled packages; however, because Spack does not model ABI compatibility between packages, all transitive dependencies of a binary package must have been built at the same time as that package in order to maintain ABI compatiblity. We present an extension to Spack, which we call splicing, that models ABI compatibility in the package ecosystem and allows seamless mixing of source and binary distribution of packages. This extension augments both the packaging language and dependency resolution engine of Spack in order to maximize reused binaries while maintaining the flexibility of source based management. Through empirical evaluation, we show that our extension incurs minimal performance overhead to dependency resolution while greatly extending the modeling capability of Spack.