§1. Inbuild is Stage 1 of the core Inform compiler, but can also be run as a stand-alone tool. See structure for the bigger picture: Inbuild handles only this part of the compilation flow —

    main source text   extension source texts
          \           /
           \         /  INFORM7 Stage 1 or INBUILD
            \       /
            \|/   \|/
           syntax tree

Used as a stand-alone tool at the command line, however, Inbuild is more flexible and interesting. See the Manual (in inbuild) and Reference Card (in inbuild).

§2. The supervisor module does all of the real work. Given a project to build, it decides what resources are needed — for example, extensions or kits — and forms a dependency graph between them. It then attempts to traverse that graph, building each resource in turn as necessary.

To do all this, supervisor must also be a filing clerk, managing "nests" of resources and worrying about semantic version numbers. Since that requires looking at source text for extensions and Inform projects, the supervisor is therefore also the part of Inform which uses the syntax service to read text in to the syntax tree.

§3. Inbuild also contains the basic foundation library and some services modules: specifically, words, syntax, html and arch.