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> Nix and Bazel solve different problems. I think both sides want to erase that difference, and I commend them for it. > I'm not sure exactly what you mean by

> Nix and Bazel solve different problems. I think both sides want to erase that difference, and I commend them for it. > I'm not sure exactly what you mean by synchronicity, but that's basically how e.g. package-lock.json works... it's the direction that everything is moving in, and Bazel is a target because it's imposing this on new frontiers rather than just being a new language where "things work that way". package-lock.json stuff is fine, and Nix has long required that everything be locked. That is the good synchronicity: it's OK if upstream moves faster, downstream catches up and just pins whatever they are using. You can see how upgrade waves cascade downstream, this is because the sychronizing is local. The internal good model is everything just lives in one repro and must update all at once. This is global synchronicity. ---- It's a lot like 1 giant lock vs Multiversion concurrency control. The MVCC aspect is that there may be a few versions in flight as things cascade down, but old versions should be retired (like committed transactions) as new ones come. The consistency is basically the pinning; nevermind what other transactions/development is going one elsewhere, each package sees a consistent view as structured by the pins. If you go listen to Google people talk about dependency/version management. It's like they think it's global lock vs inconsistency. Monorepo or chaos. This false choice irks me. I guess their dev tools people should talk to their DB people?

klodolph 6y ago
> If you go listen to Google people talk about dependency/version management. It's like they think it's global lock vs inconsistency. Monorepo or chaos. This false choice irks me. I watched this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISy7EJQPzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISy7EJQPzI I’d say this is a much more nuanced look at dependencies & versioning. We all know these days that something like semantic versioning is not enough, because it is too easy to depend on behavior which the developers of your dependencies did not expect you to depend on. So you need something more powerful than just having a bunch of developers get together and agree not to break each others’ code. Bazel is a part of that solution—if you can analyze and understand the dependencies in a project, and do so in a very automatic and reliable way, you can provide people with tools tools for updating downstream code when upstream code changes. I think people are focusing too much on Bazel as only a build system and not as part of a platform for building developer tooling, and people are focusing too much on Bazel’s original incarnation as a build system for a massive monorepo. I think there’s also a reality that we must deal with that is—as software gets larger and more complex, and as we have more dependencies, relying on version pinning for stability is losing ground as a technique for making our software more reliable. We have many more dependencies in our software now, so just subscribing to a mail feed of all of the version bumps in the libraries you use would be enough to drown you, and the longer you stay on older versions the more painful it can be to upgrade.

klodolph 6y ago

> If you go listen to Google people talk about dependency/version management. It's like they think it's global lock vs inconsistency. Monorepo or chaos. This false choice irks me. I watched this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISy7EJQPzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISy7EJQPzI I’d say this is a much more nuanced look at dependencies & versioning. We all know these days that something like semantic versioning is not enough, because it is too easy to depend on behavior which the developers of your dependencies did not expect you to depend on. So you need something more powerful than just having a bunch of developers get together and agree not to break each others’ code. Bazel is a part of that solution—if you can analyze and understand the dependencies in a project, and do so in a very automatic and reliable way, you can provide people with tools tools for updating downstream code when upstream code changes. I think people are focusing too much on Bazel as only a build system and not as part of a platform for building developer tooling, and people are focusing too much on Bazel’s original incarnation as a build system for a massive monorepo. I think there’s also a reality that we must deal with that is—as software gets larger and more complex, and as we have more dependencies, relying on version pinning for stability is losing ground as a technique for making our software more reliable. We have many more dependencies in our software now, so just subscribing to a mail feed of all of the version bumps in the libraries you use would be enough to drown you, and the longer you stay on older versions the more painful it can be to upgrade.