I've done some C/C++ with Bazel before. It's nice, except that you end up having to vendor all your dependencies if you want repeatable builds :). Had more su

I've done some C/C++ with Bazel before. It's nice, except that you end up having to vendor all your dependencies if you want repeatable builds :). Had more success sharing projects and building a community with CMake, horrible as that tool is. The reason Gradle is a quality-of-life improvement is that we had boxed ourselves into a corner. rules_jvm_external, rules_docker, rules_proto, and a set of others all relied on internal details of other rules (accidentally, because pre-MODULE.bazel everything gets loaded into one giant global namespace and collisions happen). We basically got ourselves locked in, unable to move off of rules_docker, upgrade our JVM beyond 17, or even upgrade Spring, without breaking and having to upgrade everything else. Gradle, which has first-party support for dependency management, and which is the primary system supported by large OSS vendors (Spring, etc), doesn't have these pitfalls. Poorly-written Gradle plugins can sink you as surely as Bazel packages can, but there is less opportunity for you to discover them. I'm well aware that we were Doing Bazel Wrong, and I've certainly had my share of pain with Gradle, but never in my life have I seen so much time wasted on a build system. For plain old JVM stuff, Bazel didn't work well for us.