This gave me a weird déjà vu of reading about some software that solves all the problems elegantly and performantly and that I've never otherwise seen and will forget in a day. The other software might've been a build system too.
The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
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Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#12What do people here think of Bazel [1]? In my understanding it is an open-sourced version of the build system that Google uses internally. [1] https://bazel.build/
We’ve been using it to build and deploy a ~500k loc JavaScript monorepo and I have an unpopular opinion about it. While I see the benefits of it for google scale, for us it’s just been one headache after another. Reimplementation of python for build file language? No thanks. Reimplementation of package managers? No thanks. Reimplementation of Docker? No thanks. It’s just another thing to learn, worry about, and disco…
Man, I'm sorry to hear about your experience :(
I've used bazel in a different environment (C++) and it has been amazing (compared with other C++ build systems).
Another comment below mentioned to stay away from bazel for anything else other than C++ (and maybe Java).
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve been using it to build and deploy a ~500k loc JavaScript monorepo and I have an unpopular opinion about it. While I see the benefits of it for google scale, for us it’s just been one headache after another. Reimplementation of python for build file language? No thanks. Reimplementation of package managers? No thanks. Reimplementation of Docker? No thanks. It’s just another thing to learn, worry about, and disco…
Man, I'm sorry to hear about your experience :( I've used bazel in a different environment (C++) and it has been amazing (compared with other C++ build systems). Another comment below mentioned to stay away from bazel for anything else other than C++ (and maybe Java).
Bazel is also the build system to use if you have large iOS swift applications, with it's networked HTTP build cache and so on.
I've also seen it used with java android apps.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#14Ohhh the tragedy of build systems... Maybe the best example of meta technical debt on the planet, for so many canonical reasons that technical debt emerges in general. Top reasons no software engineering team fixes this: The build system will not directly improve the end product. So no company wants to pay for it / use the time. Due to the previous reason, a build system is not a compelling value proposition as a pro…
Companies invest in build systems if it will increase their developer productivity enough, which is usually a big company problem, thus why google built blaze, twitter & FB reproduced it with pants and buck and now google has open sourced it as bazel.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#15The biggest problem: "it can do everything make can do"
This means it cannot enforce pinning-on-a-hash ('hermetic' builds in bazel lingo): if you allow dev team to say `git clone hxxp://whatever/whatever/master` somewhere in the bowels of the build system, they invariably go for it. It's easy, agile and it works (for months if not years).
Result? On a large project, every week you get a build broken by some third-party change. Because make is too capable.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#16What do people here think of Bazel [1]? In my understanding it is an open-sourced version of the build system that Google uses internally. [1] https://bazel.build/
There are a lot of things I like about it, and I like how robust it is once it works. But what I don't like is probably more interesting:
Getting it to work can sometimes be a pain in the rear (although I'm not sure other systems fare much better). I'm still trying to figure out some missing header file errors... some are obvious and easy to fix, but but some are confusing as heck. I also hate the fact that I have to specify header files redundantly, once in the source file and once in the build tool.
Their documentation can also be painful to quickly find stuff in (e.g. try finding how to display the command line options passed to the C++ compiler); sometimes some flags are just spread out in the prose rather than in the normal table format. Their @// notation is not exactly intuitive; I'm still not sure I fully understand it.
And lastly, there are lots of rough edges, e.g. there's no way to call an existing Makefile and pass it conditional compiler options, so good luck sharing your compile flags across the entire codebase in an elegant manner.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#17djb? Pass.
Got burned hard on Qmail which was strangled to death by his ridiculous management practices. Never again.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#18What do people here think of Bazel [1]? In my understanding it is an open-sourced version of the build system that Google uses internally. [1] https://bazel.build/
I have dealt with it as part of packaging and adapting tensorflow. Some of my opinions:
* Bazel needs gigabytes of memory to run;
* It needs minutes to bootstrap (which it will every time, because you don’t want a multi-gigabyte-sized daemon running around);
* It breaks every second day. If you are building version X of $something, you better go and get the exact version of Bazel that the developers of $something were using when tagging X;
* And when they fail to build there’s no chance you will be able to figure it out without spending days on it.
Don’t use Bazel unless writing code that only you yourself can maintain is your goal.
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#19The biggest problem: "it can do everything make can do" This means it cannot enforce pinning-on-a-hash ('hermetic' builds in bazel lingo): if you allow dev team to say `git clone hxxp://whatever/whatever/master` somewhere in the bowels of the build system, they invariably go for it. It's easy, agile and it works (for months if not years). Result? On a large project, every week you get a build broken by some third-par…
One can say the same thing about C++ ever since 0x version
Re: The only build system that might someday replace make (2010)
#20From my recent Twitter mentions: Build Systems à la Carte (2018). This presents a theoretical analysis of build systems (which they have defined broadly enough to include Microsoft Excel) and how to pick and choose the various properties they provide.
This came up because I am promoting a conceptually similar unified theory of Reactive UI, which also has things in common with build systems. In fact, Svelte also happens to cite Excel as an inspiration for its approach to incremental updates. My blog post on this went live yesterday, and a birdie tells me it will hit the HN front page later today.
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...