bazel-buildfarm VS cargo-raze

It can be. By default it is local.

But it has protobufs interfaces (IIRC), so a distributed build farm would generate the grpc endpoints for their implementation and then you tell bazel on the command line (or via .bazelrc) the address of the build farm it can use.

There's a couple of projects that implement the distributed/grpc part, the main one is https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

Not sure what to say concerning buildfarm's remote execution.

Reading an issue I've opened 1y ago [1], seems the backend requires the client to have a specific gcc version.

That's a strong limitation imho.

[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545

You can also set up a remote build service that uses the same environment you run the containers in using something like https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

Currently migrating to Bazel + bazel remote execution via Bazel buildfarm. Bazel has native support for build clusters.

The same reason Bazel builds avoid using Cargo when building Rust software, so I'll describe why Bazel would do this:

- Bazel wants to cache remote resources, like each respective crate's source files.

- Bazel then wants to build each crate in a sandbox, and cache the build artifacts

This is an established practice, and Nix wants to drive the build for the same reasons.

See:

- https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

- https://github.com/google/cargo-raze

I can make much more sense of C++ code to ensure that two build systems produce the same effect than I can parse and learn two completely unconnected programming languages deeply enough to do the same. I can unit-test core routines. I can as easily extract core logic into shared (configuration) files etc. The benefit of a standard is not to discourage alternatives but rather to agree on definitive semantics and shared and common needs (that is: in this case needs for interfaces to the compiler/linker). The implementation and general availabilty is just one of the by-product. The ability to do introspection in common terms is maybe the most consequential other product, and this is critical for 'transpiling' to other build systems and writing automated adapters such as the one that bazel is recommend for cargo's dependency management.

Cargo is not that tightly coupled with Rust. You can absolutely use bare rustc, and in fact people do that with other build systems like Bazel.

Interesting, aren't the community-driven crates for these areas satisfactory enough? There's PROST and tonic, and quite well-used. I don't know about Bazel though, but I found this. Feel free to correct me on this subject, I admit I don't know that much about it.

There is a project to generate Bazel BUILD files from Cargo.toml.