4 ms·

After digging into Bazel a bit recently, I really hope they invest significant energy into the IDE story next. That is a huge, gaping hole that is being not-rea

After digging into Bazel a bit recently, I really hope they invest significant energy into the IDE story next. That is a huge, gaping hole that is being not-really solved in all the language/IDE ecosystems and is a _massive_ roadblock to adoption. IDE integration would remove 90% of my hesitation to push it at my company.

vlovich123 6y ago
It’s not much work. Internally at Google they have Idea integration. The challenge for open sourcing it may be that the plugin is also responsible for Google3 integration if I recall correctly.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  "not much work" is absolutely not the feeling I have about it based on some conference talks about the topic (e.g. the various xcode talks, or the Wix talks on intelliJ), and my own thought experiments on getting it tied into Visual Studio / Visual Studio for Mac. I think the Bazel team introduced Aspects and punted the rest for a later date. Now they hope each language/IDE community will take that infrastructure and build out the rest of the ecosystem. I think its too important of a piece of the puzzle to leave to the community.
Teknoman117 6y ago
I really like Bazel as well. As you said, cross language dependency management in CMake is hilariously annoying. However, I'm at practically a C++ only shop so it rarely comes up. Where I am we were using CMake 2 for our build system for a long time and it got into bad shape. When we made the decision to rewrite the build system (across a few dozen subprojects), we looked at a few - Meson, Bazel, CMake, etc. CMake was hard to argue against because of the recent work (last few years) by Microsoft to support CMake projects directly (File -> Open Folder). We wanted to try to get away from maintaining separate IDE projects for every platform for every project.

4 ms·

After digging into Bazel a bit recently, I really hope they invest significant energy into the IDE story next. That is a huge, gaping hole that is being not-rea

by JamesSwift 6y ago

vlovich123 6y ago
It’s not much work. Internally at Google they have Idea integration. The challenge for open sourcing it may be that the plugin is also responsible for Google3 integration if I recall correctly.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  "not much work" is absolutely not the feeling I have about it based on some conference talks about the topic (e.g. the various xcode talks, or the Wix talks on intelliJ), and my own thought experiments on getting it tied into Visual Studio / Visual Studio for Mac. I think the Bazel team introduced Aspects and punted the rest for a later date. Now they hope each language/IDE community will take that infrastructure and build out the rest of the ecosystem. I think its too important of a piece of the puzzle to leave to the community.
Teknoman117 6y ago
I really like Bazel as well. As you said, cross language dependency management in CMake is hilariously annoying. However, I'm at practically a C++ only shop so it rarely comes up. Where I am we were using CMake 2 for our build system for a long time and it got into bad shape. When we made the decision to rewrite the build system (across a few dozen subprojects), we looked at a few - Meson, Bazel, CMake, etc. CMake was hard to argue against because of the recent work (last few years) by Microsoft to support CMake projects directly (File -> Open Folder). We wanted to try to get away from maintaining separate IDE projects for every platform for every project.