Bazel Alternatives

Bazel reviews and mentions

• Incremental Builds for Haskell with Bazel
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jun 2022

  I migrated a mid-size polyglot project from Makefiles to Bazel and C++ was a large component of the project.

  Some obstacles:

  1. Building with QT5 MOC & UI files. There is a great library[0] for it but it has hardcoded paths to the QT binaries and header files assuming a system-wide installation. I had to patch the rule to point to our QT location. Then it worked fine.

  2. There is no rule to build a fully static library[1]. Since we were shipping a static library in our Makefile system, that was somewhat annoying.

  3. We were using system links like `$PROJECT_ROOT/links/GCC/vX.Y.Z/ -> /opt/gcc/...` to point to all the build tools, but these didn't work in Bazel I think because it required absolute paths for any binaries it calls. We ended up putting them in a .bazelrc but we would need a different one for Windows and Linux.

  4. Not good integration with IDEs

  Ultimately we did not keep using Bazel because we were building Python binaries and py_binary was too slow on Windows. And we didn't have enough time to write a PyInstaller rule.

  [0]: https://github.com/justbuchanan/bazel_rules_qt

  [1]: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/1920

• Is there any better options for building kotlin then gradle?
  1 project | reddit.com/r/Kotlin | 15 Jun 2022
• Rust starlark interpreters purpose?
  1 project | reddit.com/r/bazel | 6 Jun 2022

  Secondly, let me check my current version of the Bazel source. The Java Starlark code (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/tree/master/src/main/java/net/starlark/java) is about 22 KLoC (accoridng to "find src/main/java/net/starlark/java/ -name '*.java' | xargs wc -l"). The non-Starlark code (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/tree/master/src/main/java/com/google/devtools) comes out to 217 KLoC. This is just main code that's (mostly) actually bundled into the binary: I'm ignoring tests, native wrappers, and a lot of tooling.

• Tensorflow Compile Runs For A Long Time
  1 project | reddit.com/r/codehunter | 9 May 2022

  So I am trying to compile TensorFlow from the source (using a clone from their git repo from 2019-01-31). I installed Bazel from their shell script (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/download/0.21.0/bazel-0.21.0-installer-linux-x86_64.sh).

• Having trouble installing bazel on Mac OS
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/bazel | 9 May 2022

  hmm might have to do a clean uninstall and do a re-install. Make sure you've deleted the cache file as well. You can find instructions here: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/838

  2 projects | reddit.com/r/bazel | 9 May 2022

  no, that wont work as far as i know. did you try installing using homebrew? Seems like there's a version where it causes some conflict on .bazelversion that gies out an error (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/10356). They seem to have fixed it but may be it just works better as a homebrew install.

• Google Is 2B Lines of Code–and It's All in One Place
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2022

  (Opinions are my own)

  > Do they do an immense amount of code generation?

  Blaze (aka Bazel [0]) has provisions that make it easy to generate code but this happens as a compile step rather than something that is checked into a git repo.

  [0] - https://bazel.build/

• Bazel in Vulkan Projects. Part 1 — Environment Setup
  1 project | reddit.com/r/vulkan | 6 May 2022

  Yeah, similarly to cmake, Bazel is a build tool. Here is its official webpage https://bazel.build/

• Source forest creation failed error
  1 project | reddit.com/r/bazel | 30 Apr 2022

  Best to post on the bazel issue tracker https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues

• Building a Node.js monorepo with Pnpm and Nx
  1 project | reddit.com/r/node | 28 Apr 2022

  About multi-language monorepos, I have not tested it by myself, but I think that maybe Nx is not the best tool. It is mainly focused on JavaScript. It has a lot of plugins for different JavaScript frameworks, but there are very few plugins for other languages. You can check a list of available community plugins here. Maybe you can try with Bazel or any other monorepo tool more focused to multi-language. This site contains a comparison between tools and other resources that may be useful before taking a decision.

• Casync – A Content-Addressable Data Synchronization Tool
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2022

  I did PoC experiments with compression, chunking, and IPFS here: https://github.com/SaveTheRbtz/bazel-cache

  If you need a mature compression implementation for bazel I would recommend using recent bazel versions w/ gRPC-based bazel-remote: https://github.com/buchgr/bazel-remote

  bazel nowadays supports end-to-end compression w/ `--experimental_remote_cache_compression`: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/pull/14041

• Looking for an AWS job in Germany
  1 project | reddit.com/r/sre | 21 Apr 2022

  It’s intentionally vague because there’s so much that isn’t publicly available info that we’re not allowed to advertise or mention in a job posting. As far as I know nothing about our CI/CD stack is open sourced or based on existing open source tools outside of Bazel (https://bazel.build), which is known internally as Blaze and is publicly well documented as part of our distributed build system.

• Run e2e tests 10x faster using firecracker VMs
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2022

  > Why do you need to snapshot live processes?

  Often times there are long-living processes which rarely change but take a long time to warm up. The Bazel [1] agent for C++ projects, the buildkit [2] state for docker, or the running Postgres or Redis server for a cloud native app for example.

  It's why running "docker build" twice on your laptop is so fast, but running "docker build" in CI seems glacially slow.

  > why is docker-in-docker a requirement, and how is that easier than qemu in qemu or qemu in docker or whatever?

  The example given was running "docker-compose build", so you'd need either docker-in-firecracker (this post), docker-in-docker, or docker-in-qemu. You'd almost never run docker-compose build on bare metal in practice, because you'd immediately need to push the images you built somewhere to use them.

  [1] https://bazel.build/

• Micro-frontends building blocks: Monorepos
  9 projects | dev.to | 4 Apr 2022

  Tools like Lerna, Bazel, Nx, Rush, Turborepo, to name a few. Lerna is probably the grand daddy of all monorepo tools. CRA, Babel, Jest are a few projects that use it. Bazel has been refined and tested for years at Google to build heavy-duty, mission-critical infrastructure, services, and applications. Turborepo is the monorepo for Vercel, the leading platform for frontend frameworks. These tools can help keep your monorepo workspaces fast, understandable and manageable.

• Is it normal for Jetpack Compose previews to be slow to rerender?
  1 project | reddit.com/r/androiddev | 30 Mar 2022

  https://bazel.build/ Used by Google and Spotify instead of Gradle since they have like 1000 modules. Gradle isn't really fit for that