rules_cc VS Bazel

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.

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/