bazel-central-registry VS rules_cc

The main change here is that Bazel now has a package repository that people can pull/push external dependencies to: https://registry.bazel.build/

This is a huge change as external dependencies used to be one of the big pain points with the Bazel pipeline.

I'm very new to Bazel and as far as I understand the new bzlmod feature and its central registry will eventually make it very easy to depend on any external project, and most importantly, it will handle versions properly.

Not that I'd recommend it, but if you symlink your system library into the bazel build area, as long as your sandboxing setup don't hose you (or you just turn it off), bazel will track system tools/library in the same way as everything else.

Bazel's rules_cc even has a system_library.bzl you can import a `system_library` from that automates this for you. https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_cc/blob/main/cc/system_l...

I'd still recommend building everything from scratch (and understanding the relationships and graph of your dependencies), but if your build isn't that complicated and you want to role the dice on UB, this isn't that hard.

As an aside, the most galling part of bazel's cache key calculations has to be that it's up to the individual rules to implement this how they see fit. The rules native to bazel written in java vary wildly compared to starlark-written rules. On thing you (or someone in your org) end up becoming pretty comfortable with while using bazel in anger is RTFC.

I found several associated issues and a closed PR that supposedly solved this issue. However, it seems that cc_rules has undergone several changes and this PR likely wouldn't function.