rules_go VS buildtools

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

My code uses 4.2.5. https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/releases/tag/4.2.5