While Bazel design seems not bad, could they have used a build system that doesn't require Java? It's especially important for bootstrapping. CMake requires only C++ at least.
Advocating for Java as a general purpose tool language sort of overlooks the incredibly broad and prevasive installbase of machines more than ten years old, as well as the rapidly growing installbase of ARM SOC machines.
For many, a tool eating up a gigabyte or more of memory is certainly not acceptable.
Not everyone has a powerful machine to do so with; many folks are still using computers that shipped with WinXP, or even Vista or 98/Me. It's a huge world outside of California.
Personally, my primary home/non-work machines are an RPi4 and a Pinebook Pro.
No, Bazel just fails to satisfy the very real need of building on less powerful machines because of its technological choice, a need served by other tools competing with it, and therefore is not really a truly general, one size fit all, solution.
The fact that you personally deem the needs of others illegitimate doesn't preclude them from actually existing.
Travel to Africa, India and South East Asia some time. The world is a big place outside of California, and the hardware available to many is not what you'll find at a cafe in San Francisco.
The RPi is an example of a growing SOC device market, but I did mention as well the enormous install base of older and under-powered devices in general.
I don't live in California (nor the US), I've only visited twice or so.
I'm from a place similar to those you're describing.
Few people would get enthusiast gear like Raspberry Pi. What they would get, instead, would be an old x86 PC with pirated Windows. A crummy knock off Chinese laptop or locally assembled PC (so not from the big OEMs).
Not quite. Even rather poor people in poor countries can get PCs with decent computing power, as PC performance plateaued circa 2010 and old PCs are really cheap. You don't need to get something 20-25 years old when something 5-10 years old is maybe 20% more expensive and a lot more powerful.
I'm curious what you consider "insane" to be -- and I mean this genuinely. Google has what I think most would consider to be a large monorepo, but also provides developer desktops with ample RAM. I've noticed blaze's startup time, but never really thought about its memory consumption. Where are you running into limits?
Are you using remote execution with Bazel?
If you have hour long builds, it's often worth investing in remote execution (just remote caching can help too).
I think open-source projects avoid Bazel not because of the Java issue. You can install it pretty easily and never realize that it's written in Java.
By analogy, I'd say that if Make is a hammer, Bazel is a CNC machine. Most DIYers are going to have hammers, and everyone understands how to use them, but CNC machines are becoming cheaper and more common.
The official .deb is 156MB compressed, which is prohibitive for all but the largest OSS projects. I assume much of that is the bundled JRE, but that only illustrates the point about Java.
Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
> If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Chromium's gn started being prototyped in 2013 [1].
Android's soong started being developed in June 2015 [2].
Bazel's first open source release was in September 2015 [3].
In addition, you surely can't be serious about Google not 'dogfooding Blaze' - it's a critical build system internally at Google. And new external projects (like gVisor) are also now built using Bazel.
> The official .deb is 156MB compressed, which is prohibitive for all but the largest OSS projects.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement. Why is 156MB prohibitive? You don't need to include Bazel in the project any more than you need to include Xcode for the macOS version of a project. You can specify a version of Bazel with .bazelversion so you don't need to worry so much about people using the wrong Bazel.
There are some systems like Waf and Autotools where the build system is customarily bundled inside the source release, but this is not universal--if you use CMake, it's almost certainly not bundled either.
> Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Android is a fairly large project itself consisting of the Kernel (which has got its own custom build system) and a ton of different components. From what I understand, for NDK projects, Bazel is moving towards "the one sane way to do things", it will just take time, this stuff doesn't happen overnight. For non-NDK (pure Java or Kotlin) projects, there's not really a point.
Chromium is a bit of a special snowflake and predates Bazel's Windows support, and a codebase the size of Chromium would take a long time to migrate--but it looks like it's heading in that direction. From what I can see in the revisions to the Chromium build system, it seems that it's massive custom build system is moving towards Bazel by leaps and bounds. It's already structured like a Bazel project and uses much of the same terminology, I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred Bazel scripts appear overnight in Chrome, because it looks like much of the groundwork has been done.
Most open-sourced Google projects use Bazel now. Of course, projects like Android and Chrome have been around for a long time and have invested in their build systems, so any change will take years.
Android and Chrome also both use git for version control. Take that how you will, but I don't think it's an indictment of Piper (https://research.google/pubs/pub45424/)
The speed and responsiveness is there, but the price is a tricky management of background daemon and aggressive memory prefetch and caching which may be a bit heavy on memory resources (which is then less available to the compiler processes). This works out well when you run the Bazel daemon locally and distribute the work to a remote build farm, but less when you're building a project like LLVM on your laptop.
To build Bazel from source in an environment where you don't want to use any Internet binaries, you need a Java built from source. Needing a Java is painful. You also need a Bazel to build Bazel.
And Bazel's build system itself IIRC wants to download stuff from the Internet on build - which can be pre-fetched, but distro maintainers still don't like having to deal with taht.
As far as implementation languages go, Java is mature, extremely stable, doesn't suffer from the quirks and foibles of older languages like C++, and is slower-moving than some of the newer languages. I know I've complained about running Java services but I think it is a great choice for writing a build system.
