13 ms·

> I’d like a bit more flexibility in specifying what I want cargo to do. Check out Bazel for Rust. It allows: * caching of artifacts. * shareable caches bet

> I’d like a bit more flexibility in specifying what I want cargo to do. Check out Bazel for Rust. It allows: * caching of artifacts. * shareable caches between {developers, build jobs} based on hashes. * remote distributed builds (on very many cores). https://github.com/google/cargo-raze https://github.com/google/cargo-raze

livinglist 4y ago
Wow, I didn’t know Basel was this powerful, gotta try it out now.
echelon 4y ago
I do not know why you're downvoted for this (crazy!?) -- this is exactly what I wanted to know [1]. I have a Rust monorepo with a bunch of "library"-type crates and about a dozen binaries (jobs, servers, userland programs) I need this in my life. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29745426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29745426
- grimgrin 4y ago
  Because at first glance it lacked context. Now the OP has updated it with relevancy, by quoting a bit from the article author.
  - mihaigalos 4y ago
    Sorry about that, I realized it once I saw the downvote (thank you - it made the post better). Empathy is essential.
    - grimgrin 4y ago
      I didn't downvote you, for what it's worth :P
- mihaigalos 4y ago
  Did you eventually get a ref to an example Bazel build for Rust in that thread? (Writing here because you'll probably not look at the other thread again.) I see the linked resources are to docs only. If it's any help, here's a bazelized Rust demo implementation: https://github.com/mihaigalos/code_templates/tree/master/rust https://github.com/mihaigalos/code_templates/tree/master/rus...
daniel_rh 4y ago
I think the newer version of this is https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust which lets you either vendor the dependencies or pull them from your Cargo.toml directly every time. Per the article: bazel + rules_rust should have the flexibility to override the linker flags that Cargo may take as required since that would be a property of the bazel toolchain used. It's a nice amalgamation of how cargo works and how bazel works. In general bazel supports hermetic builds, multiple toolchains, cross complilation, and ways to compile multi-language projects. I still wish that Cargo.toml didn't support build.rs as it can cause a lot of system-dependent problems that bazel sidesteps entirely by being hermetic.
csomar 4y ago
I wish I knew about this earlier! It's interesting that this project doesn't have a much higher visibility. Also wondering, what's the current relationship of this project with Google? (if you are involved with it)
- junon 4y ago
  It does, it's just that it... doesn't work well in practice. It's another case of "this works well for Google but doesn't translate well outside of Google". Plus, seems like Bazel is a very neutered version of Blaze anyway.
  - ikiris 4y ago
    buildfarm takes away a lot of the neutering.
    - mihaigalos 4y ago
      Not sure what to say concerning buildfarm's remote execution. Reading an issue I've opened almost 2y ago [1], seems the backend requires the client to have a specific gcc version. That's a strong limitation imho. [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545 https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545
      - p_l 4y ago
        This is related to non-hermetic build graph, so the builds have system-provided dependency in GCC, and to make the build sane requires that they are in sync.
      - ikiris 4y ago
        Never run into this issue in the real world so.... /shrug
kaba0 4y ago
I am always surprised how good and not-well-known google’s tooling is. Another example would be its closure compiler (with the accompanying j2cl/j2objc tools, which are all ridiculously cool).
- jart 4y ago
  What you might not have known is that Actually Portable Executable https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html and Bazel's Closure Compiler tooling were written by the same person. https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_closure https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_closure
  - technologia 4y ago
    @jart, just wanted to say thanks for both APE and cosmopolitan, those projects have made my life infinitely easier as well as giving me a lot of my time back not having to figure out windows executable minutia. It's a no brainer for me to create either a WASM module or an APE to get the job done.
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      And also tysm @jart for derasterize https://github.com/csdvrx/derasterize https://github.com/csdvrx/derasterize, which was a great basis to work on, and helped me make sixel-tmux https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux We achieved textmode supremacy, and jart achieved binary-portability supremacy. There seems to be a pattern here :)
- bsder 4y ago
  > I am always surprised how good and not-well-known google’s tooling is. The problem is that Google is well-known for unceremoniously dumping stuff. So my first question about any Google tool is: "Does it have enough non-Google people supporting it?" because, if it doesn't, it will die as soon as it becomes a political football. My second question about any Google tool is: "Are there small projects using it and singing its praises?" Can I use the tool to do what I need to a handful of files after reading a couple of web pages for 15 minutes and have it work. I don't need to scale to 4 gazillion foobars--I do need to get stuff done without an IT staff of 100 people. From a cursory look, Bazel fails that question. My final question about any tool is more personal: "Does it use C++?" because, if it does, then integrating with anything other than C++ is going to be a gigantic PITA. At this point there are plenty of fine alternatives to C++ that don't suck. If you don't have a clean, pleasant way of talking to things that only understand C library conventions, you fail and I'm moving on.
spockz 4y ago
I really really want to like Bazel but I’m having issues with having the amount of bookkeeping I need to do in Bazel build files. And then someone comes along saying something along the lines of “oh but we just use <somecli>” to do the updating of Bazel for us… sometimes that is even internal tooling. Something else is that most projects tend to build everything from source, even protobuf dependencies, so it takes me an hour to get the initial build of envoy done.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I don’t know what it is these days, but I can remember waiting 12 hours to compile Chromium from scratch while the entire x-windows + KDE and friends taking only 4-5 hours to compile from scratch. This was back in 2014 on a little two core laptop.
  - Cloudef 4y ago
    The joys of c++
    - FpUser 4y ago
      You saying that if rewritten in Rust Chromium will compile much faster?
      - Cloudef 4y ago
        No, rust is another slow language to compile. But there are faster ones such as C and zig. You can reduce C++ compilation times by following certain strict coding conventions, but it only gets you so far.
        lloeki 4y ago
        in such large projects linking is also a severe bottleneck, which I hear has been repeatedly tried to be addressed with alternative linkers
        4y ago
hazz99 4y ago
I’m using Bazel to build my rust project (Using the rules_rust rules) and it’a become quite a pain to use in concert with docker. This is not a complaint about Bazel specifically, its fantastic, and easily my favourite build system bar none. However it cannot cross compile Rust. This means if I’m developing on my MacBook, and I want to compile a Rust binary and put it in an Ubuntu docker container, I can’t do it on my host machine. I need to copy the source into the container and build it there, using multistage builds. But this is -extremely slow- because it cannot take advantage of Rusts build caching. I’m talking 10-15 minutes for my small Rust project. Has anyone run into this? How do you work around it? I’ve considered running a Bazel remote execution server on a local Ubuntu VM, but this feels like so much extra complexity just to use Rust, Bazel and containers.
- tinco 4y ago
  Why not just mount the code in the container instead of copying it over? Rust deals very cleanly with build artefacts from different architectures so there's no risk of corruption.
  - fnord123 4y ago
    This is a good idea but there is tension between this straightforward approach and the fact that, on macos, docker is running in a VM so it's inherently slower.
    - arein3 4y ago
      Isn't docker trying to use virtualization from the OS to run linux on "bare metal"? If so it should acheive similar speeds to native linux
      - tinco 4y ago
        The virtualized storage layer could actually be a bottleneck here. Though I think they've improved the performance of it to the point where it might no longer be a bottleneck but I'm not sure.
rajman187 4y ago
also worth noting is Buck, which is a clone of Bazel. Not only does it support Rust, interestingly it seems the next version seems to be moving toward using Rust as the language of choice for developing it [1] [1] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/07/01/future-of-buck/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/07/01/future-...
- hobofan 4y ago
  Which makes sense given yesterdays announcement that Rust is now an endorsed server-side language at Meta and Rust the recommended language for CLI tools: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/programming-languages-endorsed-for-server-side-use-at-meta/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/progra...
anothernewdude 4y ago
Last thing I want is more things to use Bazel. I can do without the headache. Perhaps Cargo can improve.
- hazz99 4y ago
  I’m hoping by more projects adopting Bazel, we get more powerful libraries, and it becomes trivial to use.
wongarsu 4y ago
There's also mozilla's sccache, which integrates with cargo (by wrapping rustc) to cache artifacts. A local cache is 2 lines of config in your .cargo/config.toml, and if you want to you can have shared caches in Redis or S3/Azure/GCP. Not nearly as flexible or powerful as Bazel, but also vastly simpler to setup if all you want is caching. https://github.com/mozilla/sccache https://github.com/mozilla/sccache
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  is there any effort to a public trusted shared cache?
  - est31 4y ago
    For single projects, it's possible to build such caches and it's done by some, e.g. Firefox uses it. But for the "any project" use case, the combination of Rust's compilation model and how crates.io works makes this hard. Due to Rust's compilation model, if crate A depends on crate B, then the version of crate B it's been compiled for can't be changed: you have to use that version. It also means that the features of the crate that have been enabled can't be changed. "Normal" Rust projects can quickly get into hundreds of crates.io dependencies in their DAG. Those are the very dependencies you want to use ssccache for. However, due to how crates.io works, basically every day you get a new updated crate in your DAG, and this invalidates all the crates that depend on it, including your own. In a single project use case, this is no problem because everyone uses the same Cargo.lock so they use the same dependencies and the same features of those dependencies. But if you don't share a Cargo.lock, the problem is too wide. There are some solutions like freezing crates.io according to a schedule and only pushing out updates once per week or so. But this still leaves the feature issue unsolved. Plus it is probably against the idea of crates.io to have updates available immediately. Another solution would be API only dependencies, but this is harder to pull off.
dundarious 4y ago
These seem orthogonal to the flexibility desired in the post. My understanding is cargo-raze doesn't provide a way to trim -lm from the link line, for example -- it doesn't seem like it would provide any such features over what cargo provides.
reiniermaas 4y ago
> It allows: > > * caching of artifacts. > > * shareable caches between {developers, build jobs} based on hashes. This sounds like something that nix is optimised for. The inputs into building each package is captured so having different feature flags would just create different artifacts.

livinglist 4y ago

Wow, I didn’t know Basel was this powerful, gotta try it out now.

echelon 4y ago

I do not know why you're downvoted for this (crazy!?) -- this is exactly what I wanted to know [1]. I have a Rust monorepo with a bunch of "library"-type crates and about a dozen binaries (jobs, servers, userland programs) I need this in my life. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29745426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29745426

grimgrin 4y ago
Because at first glance it lacked context. Now the OP has updated it with relevancy, by quoting a bit from the article author.
- mihaigalos 4y ago
  Sorry about that, I realized it once I saw the downvote (thank you - it made the post better). Empathy is essential.
  - grimgrin 4y ago
    I didn't downvote you, for what it's worth :P
mihaigalos 4y ago
Did you eventually get a ref to an example Bazel build for Rust in that thread? (Writing here because you'll probably not look at the other thread again.) I see the linked resources are to docs only. If it's any help, here's a bazelized Rust demo implementation: https://github.com/mihaigalos/code_templates/tree/master/rust https://github.com/mihaigalos/code_templates/tree/master/rus...

daniel_rh 4y ago

I think the newer version of this is https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust which lets you either vendor the dependencies or pull them from your Cargo.toml directly every time. Per the article: bazel + rules_rust should have the flexibility to override the linker flags that Cargo may take as required since that would be a property of the bazel toolchain used. It's a nice amalgamation of how cargo works and how bazel works. In general bazel supports hermetic builds, multiple toolchains, cross complilation, and ways to compile multi-language projects. I still wish that Cargo.toml didn't support build.rs as it can cause a lot of system-dependent problems that bazel sidesteps entirely by being hermetic.

csomar 4y ago

I wish I knew about this earlier! It's interesting that this project doesn't have a much higher visibility. Also wondering, what's the current relationship of this project with Google? (if you are involved with it)

junon 4y ago
It does, it's just that it... doesn't work well in practice. It's another case of "this works well for Google but doesn't translate well outside of Google". Plus, seems like Bazel is a very neutered version of Blaze anyway.
- ikiris 4y ago
  buildfarm takes away a lot of the neutering.
  - mihaigalos 4y ago
    Not sure what to say concerning buildfarm's remote execution. Reading an issue I've opened almost 2y ago [1], seems the backend requires the client to have a specific gcc version. That's a strong limitation imho. [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545 https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545
    - p_l 4y ago
      This is related to non-hermetic build graph, so the builds have system-provided dependency in GCC, and to make the build sane requires that they are in sync.
    - ikiris 4y ago
      Never run into this issue in the real world so.... /shrug

kaba0 4y ago

I am always surprised how good and not-well-known google’s tooling is. Another example would be its closure compiler (with the accompanying j2cl/j2objc tools, which are all ridiculously cool).

jart 4y ago
What you might not have known is that Actually Portable Executable https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html and Bazel's Closure Compiler tooling were written by the same person. https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_closure https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_closure
- technologia 4y ago
  @jart, just wanted to say thanks for both APE and cosmopolitan, those projects have made my life infinitely easier as well as giving me a lot of my time back not having to figure out windows executable minutia. It's a no brainer for me to create either a WASM module or an APE to get the job done.
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    And also tysm @jart for derasterize https://github.com/csdvrx/derasterize https://github.com/csdvrx/derasterize, which was a great basis to work on, and helped me make sixel-tmux https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux We achieved textmode supremacy, and jart achieved binary-portability supremacy. There seems to be a pattern here :)
bsder 4y ago
> I am always surprised how good and not-well-known google’s tooling is. The problem is that Google is well-known for unceremoniously dumping stuff. So my first question about any Google tool is: "Does it have enough non-Google people supporting it?" because, if it doesn't, it will die as soon as it becomes a political football. My second question about any Google tool is: "Are there small projects using it and singing its praises?" Can I use the tool to do what I need to a handful of files after reading a couple of web pages for 15 minutes and have it work. I don't need to scale to 4 gazillion foobars--I do need to get stuff done without an IT staff of 100 people. From a cursory look, Bazel fails that question. My final question about any tool is more personal: "Does it use C++?" because, if it does, then integrating with anything other than C++ is going to be a gigantic PITA. At this point there are plenty of fine alternatives to C++ that don't suck. If you don't have a clean, pleasant way of talking to things that only understand C library conventions, you fail and I'm moving on.

spockz 4y ago

I really really want to like Bazel but I’m having issues with having the amount of bookkeeping I need to do in Bazel build files. And then someone comes along saying something along the lines of “oh but we just use <somecli>” to do the updating of Bazel for us… sometimes that is even internal tooling. Something else is that most projects tend to build everything from source, even protobuf dependencies, so it takes me an hour to get the initial build of envoy done.

withinboredom 4y ago
I don’t know what it is these days, but I can remember waiting 12 hours to compile Chromium from scratch while the entire x-windows + KDE and friends taking only 4-5 hours to compile from scratch. This was back in 2014 on a little two core laptop.
- Cloudef 4y ago
  The joys of c++
  - FpUser 4y ago
    You saying that if rewritten in Rust Chromium will compile much faster?
    - Cloudef 4y ago
      No, rust is another slow language to compile. But there are faster ones such as C and zig. You can reduce C++ compilation times by following certain strict coding conventions, but it only gets you so far.
      - lloeki 4y ago
        in such large projects linking is also a severe bottleneck, which I hear has been repeatedly tried to be addressed with alternative linkers
      - 4y ago

hazz99 4y ago

I’m using Bazel to build my rust project (Using the rules_rust rules) and it’a become quite a pain to use in concert with docker. This is not a complaint about Bazel specifically, its fantastic, and easily my favourite build system bar none. However it cannot cross compile Rust. This means if I’m developing on my MacBook, and I want to compile a Rust binary and put it in an Ubuntu docker container, I can’t do it on my host machine. I need to copy the source into the container and build it there, using multistage builds. But this is -extremely slow- because it cannot take advantage of Rusts build caching. I’m talking 10-15 minutes for my small Rust project. Has anyone run into this? How do you work around it? I’ve considered running a Bazel remote execution server on a local Ubuntu VM, but this feels like so much extra complexity just to use Rust, Bazel and containers.

tinco 4y ago
Why not just mount the code in the container instead of copying it over? Rust deals very cleanly with build artefacts from different architectures so there's no risk of corruption.
- fnord123 4y ago
  This is a good idea but there is tension between this straightforward approach and the fact that, on macos, docker is running in a VM so it's inherently slower.
  - arein3 4y ago
    Isn't docker trying to use virtualization from the OS to run linux on "bare metal"? If so it should acheive similar speeds to native linux
    - tinco 4y ago
      The virtualized storage layer could actually be a bottleneck here. Though I think they've improved the performance of it to the point where it might no longer be a bottleneck but I'm not sure.

rajman187 4y ago

also worth noting is Buck, which is a clone of Bazel. Not only does it support Rust, interestingly it seems the next version seems to be moving toward using Rust as the language of choice for developing it [1] [1] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/07/01/future-of-buck/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/07/01/future-...

hobofan 4y ago
Which makes sense given yesterdays announcement that Rust is now an endorsed server-side language at Meta and Rust the recommended language for CLI tools: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/programming-languages-endorsed-for-server-side-use-at-meta/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/progra...

anothernewdude 4y ago

Last thing I want is more things to use Bazel. I can do without the headache. Perhaps Cargo can improve.

hazz99 4y ago
I’m hoping by more projects adopting Bazel, we get more powerful libraries, and it becomes trivial to use.

wongarsu 4y ago

There's also mozilla's sccache, which integrates with cargo (by wrapping rustc) to cache artifacts. A local cache is 2 lines of config in your .cargo/config.toml, and if you want to you can have shared caches in Redis or S3/Azure/GCP. Not nearly as flexible or powerful as Bazel, but also vastly simpler to setup if all you want is caching. https://github.com/mozilla/sccache https://github.com/mozilla/sccache

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
is there any effort to a public trusted shared cache?
- est31 4y ago
  For single projects, it's possible to build such caches and it's done by some, e.g. Firefox uses it. But for the "any project" use case, the combination of Rust's compilation model and how crates.io works makes this hard. Due to Rust's compilation model, if crate A depends on crate B, then the version of crate B it's been compiled for can't be changed: you have to use that version. It also means that the features of the crate that have been enabled can't be changed. "Normal" Rust projects can quickly get into hundreds of crates.io dependencies in their DAG. Those are the very dependencies you want to use ssccache for. However, due to how crates.io works, basically every day you get a new updated crate in your DAG, and this invalidates all the crates that depend on it, including your own. In a single project use case, this is no problem because everyone uses the same Cargo.lock so they use the same dependencies and the same features of those dependencies. But if you don't share a Cargo.lock, the problem is too wide. There are some solutions like freezing crates.io according to a schedule and only pushing out updates once per week or so. But this still leaves the feature issue unsolved. Plus it is probably against the idea of crates.io to have updates available immediately. Another solution would be API only dependencies, but this is harder to pull off.

dundarious 4y ago

These seem orthogonal to the flexibility desired in the post. My understanding is cargo-raze doesn't provide a way to trim -lm from the link line, for example -- it doesn't seem like it would provide any such features over what cargo provides.

reiniermaas 4y ago

> It allows: > > * caching of artifacts. > > * shareable caches between {developers, build jobs} based on hashes. This sounds like something that nix is optimised for. The inputs into building each package is captured so having different feature flags would just create different artifacts.