I'm lost. Can't people build their binaries on a powerful machine instead of an ARM tablet?

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.

So Google should ship a potentially inferior tool, slower, because some people run on inappropriate or highly outdated hardware?

Hmm.

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.

The topic is whether FOSS developers should use Bazel, not whether Bazel is good for Google.

For many it is Bazel that is inferior due to development environment constraints.

And "outdated" is a questionable term: if it satisfies their needs, why upgrade?

Maybe Google should build better tools.

I think you're part of a minority, though.

You're talking about computers from 20, 20+ years ago and about Raspberry Pi.

It's a personal choice.

You can get a good second hand desktop from 2012-2015 for the price of your Raspberry Pi.

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.

I've lived in other less developed countries and it's not like a raspberry Pi is the most people can afford there.

Have you lived in the places you've listed?

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 have family in Colombia.

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).

It seems we agree, then? Those devices you mention would be in the category of older, lower-power machines that I mentioned.

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.

Bazel requires gigabytes of memory; for a 10y old machine that's still going to eat up most of what you've got.