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I drove the adoption of Bazel for my C++ project, which certainly does not have an entire team (nor even an entire person) dedicated to maintaining the build sy

I drove the adoption of Bazel for my C++ project, which certainly does not have an entire team (nor even an entire person) dedicated to maintaining the build system. We’re having incredible build performance with it, and I find its language much more readable than CMake or Make. We’re also using Bazel for things like packaging. I would encourage you to give it another go.

simoncion 2y ago
No. I spent two entire days attempting to understand (let alone correct) whatever was going wrong with the Tensorflow build. The error messages were inscrutable, as was the debug output. There was a fair bit of official documentation, but little of it was "unhappy path" documentation, and what there was was unhelpful. As far as I could tell (and it was difficult to tell given how I was generally unable to understand the problem), none of the folks talking about this tool on the Greater Internet had ever run into this problem. [0] I've never run into this problem with CMake, SCons, Make, or any of a dozen or two other build systems I've worked with. To put it another way, I've NEVER had a single problem with a build system be utterly impossible to understand and solve inside of a working day. (Sure, I've had to spend multiple working days solving multiple problems to get a build right, but I've never had any one problem prove to be utterly unsolvable in one day, let alone two.) How easy it is to get into failure modes and (more crucially) how much support the system and supporting documentation gives you for both identifying the failure mode you're in and getting out of it are much, much more important than being the fastest thing out there. [1][2] Unless I'm getting paid to use it and am required to use it and nothing else, Bazel is absolutely not worth my time. [0] This must obviously be not the case. Given the circumstances, whatever I was running into, it's certain that TONS of people must have run into it. But it's telling that I couldn't discover any other people who were running into this. [1] Yes, I'm sure that you've never had a significant problem with the tool. There are many, many useful tools out there that folks rave about that have burned me and burned the folks I work with badly enough that we won't touch them, ever. [2] Also, if you learned to use Bazel inside the Googleplex, then that absolutely is a scenario covered by my statement: "I'm sure it's legitimately fuckin amazing when you learn it at a company that's big enough to have one or more entire teams dedicated to internal developer tooling..."

simoncion 2y ago

No. I spent two entire days attempting to understand (let alone correct) whatever was going wrong with the Tensorflow build. The error messages were inscrutable, as was the debug output. There was a fair bit of official documentation, but little of it was "unhappy path" documentation, and what there was was unhelpful. As far as I could tell (and it was difficult to tell given how I was generally unable to understand the problem), none of the folks talking about this tool on the Greater Internet had ever run into this problem. [0] I've never run into this problem with CMake, SCons, Make, or any of a dozen or two other build systems I've worked with. To put it another way, I've NEVER had a single problem with a build system be utterly impossible to understand and solve inside of a working day. (Sure, I've had to spend multiple working days solving multiple problems to get a build right, but I've never had any one problem prove to be utterly unsolvable in one day, let alone two.) How easy it is to get into failure modes and (more crucially) how much support the system and supporting documentation gives you for both identifying the failure mode you're in and getting out of it are much, much more important than being the fastest thing out there. [1][2] Unless I'm getting paid to use it and am required to use it and nothing else, Bazel is absolutely not worth my time. [0] This must obviously be not the case. Given the circumstances, whatever I was running into, it's certain that TONS of people must have run into it. But it's telling that I couldn't discover any other people who were running into this. [1] Yes, I'm sure that you've never had a significant problem with the tool. There are many, many useful tools out there that folks rave about that have burned me and burned the folks I work with badly enough that we won't touch them, ever. [2] Also, if you learned to use Bazel inside the Googleplex, then that absolutely is a scenario covered by my statement: "I'm sure it's legitimately fuckin amazing when you learn it at a company that's big enough to have one or more entire teams dedicated to internal developer tooling..."