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

Thanks! Do you have any thoughts to share on reasons for the migration to Bazel?

3-6 mo of one engineer to migrate to something so hardcore as Bazel seems very good actually, especially since it seems they Did It Right. The flows in 200-engineer size org can be quite complicated.

I somehow have never seen this. Will try it out, thanks

I worked on a project where I used a Google framework that used bazel and it was a terrible experience, even though in the end I made it work. My first approach was to integrate the framework somehow into the build process I was used to (Makefiles, cmake etc), but then quickly found out this was going to be nearly impossible due to the way bazel works, so in the end I had to use bazel to build my project and to be able to add the framework as a dependency. I still had to hack into the framework bazel tree here and there. I lost a lot of time learning the quirks of bazel and in the end it contributed absolutely nothing and instead of bazel, cmake could have been used, a solution most people are familiar with. I think Googlers are generally on some kind of quest where they need to prove how smart they are by inventing all kinds of quirky weird new kind of "wheels" instead of using existing wheels to build a car, which causes problems for people who do not work at Google but are somehow forced to use Google's solutions. I am wondering if Googlers are aware of the fact that by using/inventing these kind of solutions their skill set becomes so specific they can't leave Google anymore.

A few years ago, I was involved in a team with less than 10 engineers, we decided to switch to bazel in order to improve the build times, specially the CI runtime.

On the good side:

- bazel forces you to have an acyclic architecture, still, this can feel annoying because every module needs to specify its dependencies.

- bazel does concurrent builds pretty well, optimizing the build times.

On the bad side:

- It took a considerable time to set everything up, we thought to be done but no, there was a weird stuff coming every week and most of the team ended up waiting for the bazel guy to fix it.

- IDE support was poor, in theory, we could just use intellij but most of the times it required help from the bazel-guy, in my case, I got frustrated about the needed maintenance and just accepted that an IDE wouldn't work. - Given the lack of IDE, it means that we couldn't easily execute a specific test from the UI, having to keep notes for the cli.

- In theory, you could use a shared cloud cache so that the builds are very effective but we could never set this up. - talking to engineers from other companies, they admitted that the bazel setup was hard and took a considerable amount of resources, they ended up writing many internal tools to get a effective usage.

Given that you plan to create a startup, do you plan to hire engineers? then, be prepared to the bazel-guy.

Also, as a startup, I bet your code will be small enough that the build times won't be very different with normal build tools.

I'd personally not use bazel unless my company offers a dedicated engineer just to maintain this integration, I think its overkill for small companies.