moon VS Bazel

(for context - I'm not interested in first class node support)

This seems pretty cool. I particularly like how 'gradual' it seems to be relative to things like Bazel, i.e. you can take some shell scripts and migrate things over. I did have a play and hit an initial problem around project caching I think, which I raised at [0].

One comment, from the paranoid point of view of someone who has built distributed caching build systems before is that your caching is very pessimistic! I understand why you hash outputs by default (as well as inputs), but I think that will massively reduce hit rate a lot of the time when it may not be necessary? I raised [1].

As an aside, I do wish build systems moved beyond the 'file-based' approach to inputs/outputs to something more abstract/extensible. For example, when creating docker images I'd prefer to define an extension that informs the build system of the docker image hash, rather than create marker files on disk (the same is true of initiating rebuilds on environment variable change, which I see moon has some limited support for). It just feels like language agnostic build systems saw the file-based nature of Make and said 'good enough for us' (honorable mention to Shake, which is an exception [2]).

[0] https://github.com/moonrepo/moon/issues/637

There are many tools like Lerna, Nx, Turborepo, Moon, Rush, and Bazel, to name a few. Today, we'll be using Turborepo, as it's lightweight, flexible, and easy to use.

You should give moon a try: https://moonrepo.dev/

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/