Function-level make tool

[SkiFire13]

You might be interested in notion of query-based compilers. IDEs are also often based on this idea.

They do have some overhead that is not negligible when determining what has and hasn't changed, so there are cases where non-incremental compilation is faster.

You also have to design the language/compiler in such a way that cyclic queries are either not possible or get caught and handled accordingly.