For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
Bazel 2.0
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: Bazel 2.0
#22For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
I feel like I see the pattern of people on HN being disappointed in some of the tools that come out of Google and other large engineering orgs, when they don't work out really well in orgs that are not operating at the same scale. People have similar complaints about the complexity of other projects that come out of Google. K8s comes to mind as one such example. Often times these tools must be robust to such a large variety of uses that they are simply overkill for smaller organizations. I'll readily admit that I could be wrong and Bazel is simply poorly designed, but it is perhaps worth considering that the build system used by an engineering team of 50 need not be as complex as the build system used by one of the largest engineering orgs in the world. My guess is we'd see a lot less backlash if people tried to step off the hype train for a moment and critically evaluate whether they really need to use something like Bazel or K8s when something simpler would suffice.
Re: Bazel 2.0
#23For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
Hey Drew, I'm a huge fan and have a lot of respect for your work. I feel like I see the pattern of people on HN being disappointed in some of the tools that come out of Google and other large engineering orgs, when they don't work out really well in orgs that are not operating at the same scale. People have similar complaints about the complexity of other projects that come out of Google. K8s comes to mind as one suc…
Re: Bazel 2.0
#24For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
Re: Bazel 2.0
#25Re: Bazel 2.0
#26For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
You were an order of magnitude too small to need Bazel.
Re: Bazel 2.0
#27For anyone thinking about Bazel for their project/organization... run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. It's easily the most complex and unintuitive build systems in the world, and I'm saying that as someone who used SCons. At the last job where I used it, I was on a team of 5 whose responsibilities included Bazel upkeep, which required anywhere from 10 to 50% of our time. This was used by a broader engin…
Hey Drew, I'm a huge fan and have a lot of respect for your work. I feel like I see the pattern of people on HN being disappointed in some of the tools that come out of Google and other large engineering orgs, when they don't work out really well in orgs that are not operating at the same scale. People have similar complaints about the complexity of other projects that come out of Google. K8s comes to mind as one suc…
> Build and test software of any size, quickly and reliably
Given the comments here, a tagline focusing on its strengths for large orgs/projects probably would be better marketing.
Re: Bazel 2.0
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey Drew, I'm a huge fan and have a lot of respect for your work. I feel like I see the pattern of people on HN being disappointed in some of the tools that come out of Google and other large engineering orgs, when they don't work out really well in orgs that are not operating at the same scale. People have similar complaints about the complexity of other projects that come out of Google. K8s comes to mind as one suc…
They need to do a better job of making the assumptions behind the design of the tools clearer then. Because, from what I can tell, many people get the idea that the path to success is to do what Google does (even knowing about the meme that people just try and copy Google). This doesn't just apply to their software tools, but also to their corporate processes (OKRs, etc).
Re: Bazel 2.0
#29As with many projects using semantic versioning, the major version bump just signifies there are some breaking changes. Most projects will just switch from 1.x to 2 work noticing.
It's just a few config flag flips. This is a bizarre naming. They could call it Blaze installer 2.0 for Blaze 1.
This is how Bazel rolls out incompatible changes:
- Introduce a new behavior behind a flag
- Wait
- If there was no push back (and key projects could migrate), flip the flag to enable the new behavior by default.
The goal is to give an opportunity for users to update their code in advance, and get feedback about migration issues.
Re: Bazel 2.0
#30Edit: I'm referring to building the framework itself (e.g. to contribute a fix). Building an Angular project with the CLI works quite well.