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Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#21

Post by dlahoda »

duped wrote: post #8

At a startup, you're going to rewrite you're entire product multiple times because you don't know what it actually is when you start. Your job is to get shit done as fast as possible to prove out the idea before you run out of money, and to make a demo that can convince people to give you money to actually build it right with all the lessons learned. Bazel gets in the way of this use case. It will help your small tea…

I share my bash files glued and hosted by nix shell, so that they work on other machines and importable. So nix is bash package manager and host.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#23

Post by dlahoda »

lolmisfortune wrote: post #12

I worked at a startup using bazel, and had a strongly negative experience, for the following reasons: 1. Bazel requires non obvious, continued maintenance. Bazel is a theoretically hermetic build system with universal caching and near constant build times. The sticking point is that it only has those properties if someone sets it up correctly and maintains its infrastructure. At our company, no one set this up, and a…

Intresting review.

For nix may be applies 3. But nix is more diverse and flex, so 1 ans 2 not really.

For 3,chances somebody knows nix because he setup his darwin, os or home with it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#24

Post by dlahoda »

lolmisfortune wrote: post #12

I worked at a startup using bazel, and had a strongly negative experience, for the following reasons: 1. Bazel requires non obvious, continued maintenance. Bazel is a theoretically hermetic build system with universal caching and near constant build times. The sticking point is that it only has those properties if someone sets it up correctly and maintains its infrastructure. At our company, no one set this up, and a…

Bazel is bot hermetic, like docker is not. While nix and buck2 are.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#26

Post by roland35 »

I would stay away honestly! I am ex-Meta and even when I was working at Meta my entire team struggled mightily with Buck despite having access to all our internal resources!

When it works you almost forget about all the pain... But then once I took a peek at some of the custom build rules that I was blindly copy pasting and was blown away how complicated it all was. Thousands of lines of build code...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#27

Post by aprdm »

Eridrus wrote: post #17

Also an ex-Googler. At a tiny startup of 4 engineers atm. Briefly looked into Bazel, but settled on pantsbuild since Google seems to have just thrown all the language support over the wall to the community. Being able to trivially setup CI on Github has been very helpful and important to me. Being able to easily add targets and package things that require multiple microservices has been nice. People say you can use t…

Poetry?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#28

Post by grrandalf »

shpx wrote: post #19

I worked for a company of ex-Googlers that used Bazel with Python/Django a few years ago. - It copies your files into a temporary directory to run them and that directory is named an obnoxiously long hash digest, so it effectively takes a giant shit in all your stack traces. When you're looking at an error message, half of your field of vision is taken up by line noise of the same random hash over and over again and…

(i'm the submitter) +1000 to this. "Every import you write you have to write in two files or three if you have to export it."

Others are good points too. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#29

Post by grrandalf »

nostrademons wrote: post #13

Also ex-Google engineer and founded a bunch of startups in my time away. I tried Bazel when it was first released as open-source but migrated away from it pretty quickly. It was just too complex for what it brought to the table. In a startup you should only be doing things that directly validate your business hypothesis, and futzing around with your build system is not really one of them. I found it much more product…

Thanks. Good points.

Follow up: I was wondering if bazel's hardcore declarativeness + opinionatedness-about-reproducibility might help increase confidence in some situations, e.g. an organization making binary distributions of their software to external partners.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using Bazel at startups? or migrated to/away from Bazel?

#30

Post by grrandalf »

lolmisfortune wrote: post #12

I worked at a startup using bazel, and had a strongly negative experience, for the following reasons: 1. Bazel requires non obvious, continued maintenance. Bazel is a theoretically hermetic build system with universal caching and near constant build times. The sticking point is that it only has those properties if someone sets it up correctly and maintains its infrastructure. At our company, no one set this up, and a…

Thanks a lot! +100 to your second point about language support being uneven.
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