I don't think this is very far off, most languages with a package manager are relatively easy to finagle into bazel. That said, c/c++ dependencies are not, and

I don't think this is very far off, most languages with a package manager are relatively easy to finagle into bazel. That said, c/c++ dependencies are not, and every bazel user needs to put in some extra effort there. Eventually bazel-packages won't be empty and might solve that problem, but time will tell. Right now there are a handful of (mostly Google) projects that you should be able to clone and bazel build after only having installed bazel. To build bazel itself: # install bazel w/ system package manager git clone https://bazel.googlesource.com/bazel https://bazel.googlesource.com/bazel && cd bazel && bazel build //src:bazel