I would avoid Git submodules; it seems like a fairly poorly designed feature and I'm constantly getting my submodules into a bad state (e.g. when switching bran

I would avoid Git submodules; it seems like a fairly poorly designed feature and I'm constantly getting my submodules into a bad state (e.g. when switching branches). The alternative that has worked a lot better for me, in repos that use Bazel, is Bazel external repositories (using git_repository or http_archive). A more direct replacement that I hear is better is git subtree although I haven't used it. Also, you're probably already doing this, but make sure you're running Git on an SSD! Spinning rust will slow down VCS workloads, which are disk intensive, considerably.