3 ms·
Related: https://bazel.build/faq.html https://bazel.build/faq.html >"What is Bazel? Bazel is a tool that automates software builds and tests. Supported build
by peter_d_sherman 6y ago
Related:
https://bazel.build/faq.html https://bazel.build/faq.html
>"What is Bazel?
Bazel is a tool that automates software builds and tests. Supported build tasks include running compilers and linkers to produce executable programs and libraries, and assembling deployable packages for Android, iOS and other target environments. Bazel is similar to other tools like Make, Ant, Gradle, Buck, Pants and Maven.
What is special about Bazel?
Bazel was designed to fit the way software is developed at Google. It has the following features:
Multi-language support: Bazel supports many languages, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. In contrast, with tools like Make, you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build everything from server applications running on systems in our data centers to client apps running on mobile phones.
Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result.
(PDS: See also: "Getting to Deterministic Builds on Windows" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26473420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26473420 , https://nikhilism.com/post/2020/windows-deterministic-builds https://nikhilism.com/post/2020/windows-deterministic-builds )
Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds; at Google, it is common for a server binary to have 100k source files, and builds where no files were changed take about ~200ms."