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The weirdest part here is that the author worked on a migration from their NIH build tool to Bazel for 2 years and never once mentions why all of that was even
by stefan_ 4y ago
The weirdest part here is that the author worked on a migration from their NIH build tool to Bazel for 2 years and never once mentions why all of that was even happening, and by the end of his employment, it was still not done.
He links the pants-devel announcement and here is what it says:
> Twitter has made the decision to migrate from Pants to Bazel as our primary build tool, as we believe that we have unique needs that Bazel can better address
Pants was your own fucking build tool that you invented, controlled and maintained! How on earth can it not meet your unique needs.
- bogota 4y agoI think you greatly underestimate how hard it is to find a good build engineer. Two of the smartest and hard working engineers did a bazel migration at one of my old companies and had to contribute heavily upstream to support all of our use cases. It’s much cheaper in the long run to migrate to a well supported tool that you can extend than have to continuously staff some of the best engineers to keep building on your homegrown mess. This comment is reminiscent of others i have seen about “building uber with 20 engineers” what could be so hard?
- a_t48 4y agoSeconding this- Bazel is great, but not free in terms of engineering work to integrate.
- thorncorona 4y agoI believed he mentioned early on that it was due to the perf gains Bazel provided.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago>NIH build tool They build it years before Bazel was opensourced. I find it weird that everyone acts like Twitter is a new startup that created all of it's infra 1-2 years ago, while they had 100 millions of users in 2012 - a lot of this stuff was already years in the making then.