rules_go VS Bazel

There’s an issue I reported (along with a proof of concept fix) over 4 years ago, that has yet to be fixed: building a mixed source project containing Go & C++ & C++ protocol buffers results in silently broken binaries as rules_go will happily not forward along the linker arguments that the C++ build targets (the protobuf ones, using the built in C++ rules) declare.

See https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/issues/1486

Not very confidence inspiring when Google’s build system falls over when you combine three technologies that are used commonly throughout Google’s code base (two of which were created by Google).

If you’re Google, sure, use Bazel. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend it. Google will cater to their needs and their needs only — putting the code out in the open means you get the privilege of sharing in their tech debt, and if something isn’t working, you can contribute your labor to them for free.

No thanks :)

Bazel in theory maintains its own directory of generated code that your IDE should refer to. Back when I last used Bazel, there was a bug open to make gopls properly understand this ("go packages driver" is the search term). Nobody touched this bug for a couple years, so I gave up.

Here's the bug: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/issues/512

I basically wouldn't use Bazel with Go. Go already has a build system, Bazel is best for languages that don't ship a build system, like C++.

`proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

- C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

- Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

- ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

- Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

- Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

This can be ugly in some languages. There’s decent go support in VSCode if you follow these copy & paste instructions here https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/wiki/Editor-setup

Bazel go_embed_data

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/