8 ms·
It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually
by mdoms 6y ago
It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something.
Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.
- Asmodean 6y agoFor me it has the feeling of something I would play around with in my free time. But as a drop in replacement I agree, it's a bit of a hard sell for me.
- iab 6y agoIf you have used (e.g) bazel before, I strongly encourage you to give it a bash, very easy to pickup and “feels good” to use
- tatskaari 6y agoYup fair enough. Migrating build systems is hard. I've put some work into making migrating from a `go build` project to Please a bit easier. Banzai cloud recently migrated their [Pipeline](https://github.com/banzaicloud/pipeline https://github.com/banzaicloud/pipeline) project over to use Please but admittedly it was quite a lot of work for them.
- throwaway894345 6y agoTypically (general purpose) build systems make you choose between reproducibility and performance. Please and other related tools aim to change that (however, in my experience they all fail for one reason or another—not because the problem is inherently intractable but rather because these tools are underinvested-in such that they’re infeasible for smaller organizations to operate and larger organizations can afford to roll their own in-house and get the benefits of a tool suited to their specific needs).
- pbronez 6y agoI think this “missing middle” is a common pattern in expert tools. The economics are challenging because people quickly move through the skill level where the tools are most useful.
- tatskaari 6y agoHey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’d love to hear it.
- gravypod 6y agoThanks for all the hard work! I'm very excited to see where this goes. Have you considered sponsoring, or accepting donations, to work on IDE integration? That's pretty much the only reason I migrated my current employers codebase over to Bazel instead of Please.
- tatskaari 6y agoHey! Glad you liked it :D Please is owned by Thought Machine. They’ve recently (8 months) brought me on the project full time. We’re planning on putting together a dedicated IDE team together but no promises.
- sdenton4 6y agoAs a big fan of Bazel (ok, Blaze), I'm curious what's different than what Blaze offers
- gravypod 6y agoBazel has a lot of things "missing" that had to be cut out from the OSS release. Things like grpc rule sets are extremely fragmented right now. It's a bit of A saying "the B team should maintain the rules" and B saying "the A team should maintain the rules". As such almost every single language has inconsistent support for everything: code coverage, protobuf, grpc, external dependency management, IDE integration. Also because there's no stubby, sponge, or other cool internal tools a lot of the benefits from blaze as a system are not externalized. Also, the docker support in Bazel is pretty "different". It's not bad, but it's not immediately obvious to newcomers how this is meant to work. It's getting better every day though.
- cbhl 6y agoThe FAQ suggests it's inspired by Google's blaze, because bazel hadn't been open-sourced at the time of writing. https://please.build/faq.html https://please.build/faq.html