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What's New in Bazel 6.0

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Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#11

Post by nisa »

aseipp wrote: post #10
nisa wrote: post #2

I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…

Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java? Tools like Bazel or Nix or are incredible for many reasons but they are, to a first approximation, very, very high-effort and complex tools that require care. It's like a racing car. You need an engineer on hand to keep the car running, and someone to drive it too. Maybe you're both of those people, but only…

> Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java?

Exactly that - for one it was a plugin for Alfresco ECM that disobeyed every Alfresco SDK rule :), then a custom Angular frontend that needs to be build according to the plugin - furthermore the business was of that kind that every customer had a specialized build with customization - Bazel would have solved that in a very neat way - including overriding a few source files for a specific customer.

We tried to build then docker images with maven which was just a shitshow considering our problems - however I'm not there anymore but I'd like to have the exact setup that you describe - the big hammer to don't have to deal with all the stupid things - especially as my background is sysadmin and every problem I don't have to solve anymore is good for me :)

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#12

Post by hobofan »

eklitzke wrote: post #8
nisa wrote: post #2

I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…

I'm not going to try to convince you to use Bazel. I think it's great, but ultimately choosing one build system or another is a big decision that involves weighing a lot of different factors, including what your coworkers are amenable to and have experience with. However I don't think Bazel is that difficult to get started with. The Bazel docs are admittedly a bit challenging, but the easiest way to learn things when…

The BCR also has a web UI at https://registry.bazel.build

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#13

Post by dbaupp »

nisa wrote: post #2

I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…

We’ve had a good experience using Pants 2 (https://www.pantsbuild.org/) and its dependency inference (https://blog.pantsbuild.org/why-dependency-inference/) for Python. Although we are in a monorepo, rather than a “multi-repo”.

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#16

Post by no_wizard »

NX is a very bazel like for frontend focused repositories.

I think what I struggle with the most is the opinions of the rules / plugins. Either I use it as a core task runner (easy, but lots of config the team has to maintain setting up script entries in packages etc) or I have to write custom plugins for anyting not on the "happy path".

I think thats my general frustration with these tools, they aren't terribly well built for SDK type consumption, they don't expose a core set of APIs directly, instead relying on a plugin system that can sometimes be very opaque

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#17

Post by [deleted] »

nisa wrote: post #2

I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…

[deleted]

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#19

Post by Leherenn »

We use Bazel at work for C++, and while defining targets and dependency is easy, I've really struggled with some stuff I would consider basic, like conditionally changing build flags, especially to external dependencies.

Basically, I wanted to conditionally use sanitizers for a specific target and propagate the sanitizers compiler/linker flags to the whole dependency tree. For code you own, from what I could find, you need to duplicate each target and each dependency (and their own dependencies) for each possible sanitizer and then select the right one. And for external dependencies, you need to use "Aspects", if I understood correctly, to modify the build dependency graph and inject your flags. There's a question on stackoverflow about it, but the answer is very high level (presumably by a Bazel dev), and unfortunately I didn't have time to dig it further and just abandoned.

I also had a lot of issues on an ARM Mac, including the linker issue that is apparently fixed (hooray) and recurrent crashes.

Given we do not use any of best features of Bazel (remote/distributed compilation, multiple languages, and caching (because we basically spawn a new docker container for each build)), I think CMake would have made more sense.

Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0

#20

Post by en4bz »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #18
tinglymintyfrsh wrote: post #14

0. Does it do creating static libraries yet? 1. Does it do linking to a mix of static and dynamic libraries yet? 2. Anyone try buck2, sort of bzl-like?

0 and 1 have been supported for a while. See the "linkstatic" feature.

No, they are extremely broken. You can only choose:

- Link everything static.

- Link everything dynamic.

- Link user libs as static and system libs as dynamic.

There is no easy way to link a single user lib static/dynamic without resorting to hacks/workarounds like re-importing the shared library or defining weird intermediate targets. It's completely broken.

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