1. recompile the world
The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as the
result of any small but globally visible program change. “The
world” may mean the entirety of some huge program, or may in theory
refer to every program of a certain class in the entire known universe. For
instance, “Add one #define to stdio.h, and you have to recompile the
world.” This means that any minor change to the standard-I/O header
file theoretically mandates recompiling every C program in existence, even
if only to verify that the change didn't screw something else up. In
practice, you may not actually have to recompile the world, but the
implication is that some human cleverness is required to figure out what
parts can be safely left out.
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Definitions of recompile the world
