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BazelCon 2024 Recap

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Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#11

Post by fire_lake »

Arbortheus wrote: post #8
anothername12 wrote: post #7

We have giant Go monorepo at work. Bazel build. The ex-Google guy who set it up, left. No one around who wants to put in the time to learn it. It seems like a general increase in complexity. It seems to replace the go mod stuff so we have something called gazelle that figured it out and third party ide plug-ins. The plug in for IntelliJ is janky. To top it all off, somehow we managed to get a build that is slow local…

We had the same setup, ex-Googler SRE demanded builds be done with Bazel for our Go monorepo. He convinced someone to switch it all over, all builds, deploys, CI, testing, etc were all dependent on Bazel. That person left, and the Bazel stuff was left unmaintained as no one had the interest nor time to learn it. Later Bazel decide to kill off rules_docker and replace it with rules_oci, which means we can no longer up…

I’m guessing the build became much slower due to the lack of caching though?

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#12

Post by fire_lake »

ninjazee124 wrote: post #10

We tried Bazel for a java monorepo. Not having good IDE support was a deal-breaker because it would complicate things for onboarding and junior devs

I found maintaining IDE files and a Bazel build side by side to be surprisingly easy.

It’s for sure a weak point with Bazel though.

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#13

Post by aliasxneo »

steven-xu wrote: post #5

> Bazel is designed to be optimal and has perfect knowledge of the state of the world, yet it’s too slow for quick operations. This is one of the biggest challenges where Bazel falls short of non-Bazel tooling for us in the Web development/Node.js world. The Node ecosystem has characteristics that push Bazel scaling (node_modules is 100k+ files and 1GB+), and Bazel's insistence on getting builds correct/reproducible…

It's not unique to Bazel. Nix also struggles with Node.js. I'm not too fond of either solution, but to me, the problem lies in the Node ecosystem, and it seems unlikely a "language-agnostic" tool will ever be able to crack that nut.

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#14

Post by pianoben »

ninjazee124 wrote: post #10

We tried Bazel for a java monorepo. Not having good IDE support was a deal-breaker because it would complicate things for onboarding and junior devs

Same experience here; I moved us to Gradle six months ago, and like magic all the whining in Slack about our build system just... went away.

Turns out, when your build system doesn't occupy 5-15% of your teams' working days, they get a lot more done!

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#16

Post by mbarr »

dijit wrote: post #2

What's the option if I want to learn Bazel to an intermediate level and I don't work with former Googlers? There's a decent number of Hello World examples around, and I can get moving with some rulesets, but using it for more than toy projects seems to be really hard for me and there's not a lot of intermediate content from what I can tell. There's "Advanced" reference materials, and countless "getting started" tutor…

Selenium has a pretty good Bazel setup which uses a lot of different functionality:

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#17

Post by dcsommer »

I'd love to hear more about the relationship between Buck2 and Bazel such that they share a conference. Sure, they are quite similar systems and both use Starlark DSL, but is there a long term vision of these projects belonging "together" or even merging? Or was Buck2 a one-off guest?

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#18

Post by jmmv »

dcsommer wrote: post #17

I'd love to hear more about the relationship between Buck2 and Bazel such that they share a conference. Sure, they are quite similar systems and both use Starlark DSL, but is there a long term vision of these projects belonging "together" or even merging? Or was Buck2 a one-off guest?

Buck 2 was part of the "Build Meetup", not BazelCon, which is a more-frequent event that has room for more than just Bazel (although it's still pretty focused on Bazel-related topics and similar build systems). More details at https://meetup.build/

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#19

Post by sebastos »

So it's 2024, and the plan is that we're going to wait another few years for BSP to be finished before vscode support is anything more than a toy?

If their goal is adoption, that is just _awful_ pathfinding. Probably harkens the beginning of a death spiral for the project, if I'm to make a prediction.

Re: BazelCon 2024 Recap

#20

Post by zeroDivisible »

dijit wrote: post #2

What's the option if I want to learn Bazel to an intermediate level and I don't work with former Googlers? There's a decent number of Hello World examples around, and I can get moving with some rulesets, but using it for more than toy projects seems to be really hard for me and there's not a lot of intermediate content from what I can tell. There's "Advanced" reference materials, and countless "getting started" tutor…

You can check some open source projects (envoy is the one I know) which are using it. The bigger projects are fun way to learn some tricks.
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