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Seriously tried adopting Bazel on a team once and never again. Its a huge headache and requires a dedicated engineer resource to be available to assist/debug/te

Seriously tried adopting Bazel on a team once and never again. Its a huge headache and requires a dedicated engineer resource to be available to assist/debug/teach when inevitably someone wants to do (or does) something outside the structure and expectations of Bazel. Every so often I try again on a personal project and realize im spending more time futzing with Bazel than writing code. Its a tool that’s perfect for Google.

sto_hristo 5y ago
It's a build framework like gradle but with python instead of groovy. It's extremely powerful, just like gradle is, so it requires considerable time to get comfortable with it. I never regretted spending the time with gradle as my builds get more and more flexible and good in time. I don't think i will ever push to bazel though, as to me it looks like gradle with a python dsl.
rtpg 5y ago
An alternate voice here: it took a long time for us to get Bazel (and there's still a lot of headbanging on stuff) but if you want fast CI times, a huge test suite, and not have to deal with like 20 repositories (especially if you want cross-cutting PRs) it's basically the only reasonable tool that will get you there. And yeah, you gotta have someone spend a lot of time with it (maybe comparable to futzing about with some JS webpack spaghetti-code... thing). I think if you're _not_ using JS (and to a lesser extent, Python), it feels like a no-brainer. Unfortunately it's super oriented around getting build artifacts, which doesn't work so well with Python/JS so you're going to have to fight stuff a bit (though the Bazel Slack channel is filled with pretty helpful people). Overall I've gotten way madder at the other tooling for being "wrong" more than Bazel itself (lots of people really do random stuff when faced with symlinks for example). I don't know what the "right" amount of time is, but if you current have 30min+ CI times, this can cut stuff down way more and get you much closer to a nice CI/CD flow. The thing that kinda kills me is that it feels purposefully obtuse at time (in particular about obsfucating the custom rules stuff, despite it being _the_ way to wrap existing projects nicely). But all the Xooglers who end up writing Bazel clones somehow end up with even more obtuse tools...

sto_hristo 5y ago

It's a build framework like gradle but with python instead of groovy. It's extremely powerful, just like gradle is, so it requires considerable time to get comfortable with it. I never regretted spending the time with gradle as my builds get more and more flexible and good in time. I don't think i will ever push to bazel though, as to me it looks like gradle with a python dsl.

rtpg 5y ago

An alternate voice here: it took a long time for us to get Bazel (and there's still a lot of headbanging on stuff) but if you want fast CI times, a huge test suite, and not have to deal with like 20 repositories (especially if you want cross-cutting PRs) it's basically the only reasonable tool that will get you there. And yeah, you gotta have someone spend a lot of time with it (maybe comparable to futzing about with some JS webpack spaghetti-code... thing). I think if you're _not_ using JS (and to a lesser extent, Python), it feels like a no-brainer. Unfortunately it's super oriented around getting build artifacts, which doesn't work so well with Python/JS so you're going to have to fight stuff a bit (though the Bazel Slack channel is filled with pretty helpful people). Overall I've gotten way madder at the other tooling for being "wrong" more than Bazel itself (lots of people really do random stuff when faced with symlinks for example). I don't know what the "right" amount of time is, but if you current have 30min+ CI times, this can cut stuff down way more and get you much closer to a nice CI/CD flow. The thing that kinda kills me is that it feels purposefully obtuse at time (in particular about obsfucating the custom rules stuff, despite it being _the_ way to wrap existing projects nicely). But all the Xooglers who end up writing Bazel clones somehow end up with even more obtuse tools...