> Makefile can do all that too, I guess it's theoretically possible, but why would you do this? This sounds like some kind of "I want to prove it can be done"

> Makefile can do all that too, I guess it's theoretically possible, but why would you do this? This sounds like some kind of "I want to prove it can be done" project like running a web server on a Commodore 64, or making a kitchen knife out of cardboard. Yes, you could figure out a way to download and install dependencies using Make and Curl, and maybe you could build the same library for multiple targets using a bunch of variable expansions, possibly by invoking make multiple times, or including the same makefile multiple times. Make sucks; it sucks a lot; I'd be miserable. And then if you aren't very careful, you'll end up forgetting to declare some dependency, or some flag change will invalidate your build but Make won't do anything, or you'll make a change to your makefile and forget to clean, and then you spend another hour or day debugging some build that was made out of stale parts. I've done this before, which is why I avoid make for everything but the smallest projects. > without java dependency Bazel does not have a Java dependency. I think you might be assuming that because Bazel is written in Java, somehow that means that Java must be installed on your computer. This is not true. Bazel is a self-contained executable you can drop in /usr/local/bin. I really don't understand your perspective here at all. I've seen people defend make, but make is full of so many traps and gotchas--I wonder how someone could use make and then decide that these traps and gotchas are okay. The projects that successfully use it tend to be small projects, use generated makefiles (automake, cmake, etc), or tend to be a bit simpler. I use make myself, but as a rule of thumb, only for projects with a few files.