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> know it was written by the Very Smart People at google For Google. That's the key. I have the privilege of experiencing both sides, having been at Google for

> know it was written by the Very Smart People at google For Google. That's the key. I have the privilege of experiencing both sides, having been at Google for nine years. I never had a problem with Blaze, but using Bazel in a smaller company has been extremely painful. I think there are just very few places that have the exact problems as Google where something like Bazel would be a great fit.

fragmede 2y ago
Compiling things and wanting a robust build cache so developers spend less time waiting isn't a problem remotely unique to Google. You might not have Google scale to hire a team of developers to be able to optimize it to the N'th degree like they can, but holy shit we are not gonna use Makefiles for advanced build systems anymore.
- sepositus 2y ago
  > Compiling things and wanting a robust build cache so developers spend less time waiting isn't a problem remotely unique to Google. That wasn't my argument at all. Plenty of modern tools address this exact need; it isn't unique to Bazel. If you read the article, the author made many interesting remarks on how Bazel reflects the unique design choices of Blaze, which were often picked due to Google's needs. My point is that when people hit these barriers, they need to understand that it's not because they are unintelligent or incapable of understanding a complex system. That's what the OP I responded to was saying, and I was just providing some advice.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    ah yeah that's fair
anon6362 2y ago
That's the rub. It provides scalability for very large organization, of which, there are few. It's similar to running OpenStack. Meta also has some projects like this, such as buck2 which lacks the really good virtual FS acceleration stuff (eden). Megacorp FOSS tend to skew towards offering whizbang features that are incomplete, complicated, poorly documented, and require a lot of extra work.
- spwa4 2y ago
  Actually if you could make something like github, where all software would be part of a single megarepo and built constantly that would be incredibly useful, and bazel would be excellent for that (or at least the closest thing we have to reasonable) The problem with bazel and almost every other build system (all except the "scan the source files and build a dependency graph" ones) is that you'll be writing build instructions for all your dependencies that aren't using it. If that was done for you, they'd be incredible.

fragmede 2y ago

Compiling things and wanting a robust build cache so developers spend less time waiting isn't a problem remotely unique to Google. You might not have Google scale to hire a team of developers to be able to optimize it to the N'th degree like they can, but holy shit we are not gonna use Makefiles for advanced build systems anymore.

sepositus 2y ago
> Compiling things and wanting a robust build cache so developers spend less time waiting isn't a problem remotely unique to Google. That wasn't my argument at all. Plenty of modern tools address this exact need; it isn't unique to Bazel. If you read the article, the author made many interesting remarks on how Bazel reflects the unique design choices of Blaze, which were often picked due to Google's needs. My point is that when people hit these barriers, they need to understand that it's not because they are unintelligent or incapable of understanding a complex system. That's what the OP I responded to was saying, and I was just providing some advice.
- fragmede 2y ago
  ah yeah that's fair

anon6362 2y ago

That's the rub. It provides scalability for very large organization, of which, there are few. It's similar to running OpenStack. Meta also has some projects like this, such as buck2 which lacks the really good virtual FS acceleration stuff (eden). Megacorp FOSS tend to skew towards offering whizbang features that are incomplete, complicated, poorly documented, and require a lot of extra work.

spwa4 2y ago
Actually if you could make something like github, where all software would be part of a single megarepo and built constantly that would be incredibly useful, and bazel would be excellent for that (or at least the closest thing we have to reasonable) The problem with bazel and almost every other build system (all except the "scan the source files and build a dependency graph" ones) is that you'll be writing build instructions for all your dependencies that aren't using it. If that was done for you, they'd be incredible.