Is it wrong to say that for 95% of the internet that isn’t FAANG, bazel is a solution in search of a problem? I’ve never once seen or used a build system so unnecessarily complex. If you’re a 100k software company it makes a lot of sense to build in complexity but for the majority of the internet, why is something like Bazel any better than existing, simpler build tools?
Bazel solves a ton of problems other systems don't, but it introduces a ton of its own. If you can afford (or are currently accidentally affording) 2-3 FTEs managing builds, that's all you need to scale Bazel indefinitely and solve basically all of the rest of your build problems. If you can't afford a dedicated Bazel team then it's absolutely not worth using on anything more than a single "team" (people talking to each other every day, a dedicated Bazel xoogler, probably 5-13 people).
As to the actual "why", even little things like BUILD files requiring you to enumerate dependency graphs gives you a leg up that you _can_ implement in other build systems, but likely won't. Whether you're a "monorepo" or not, you still have all your code living _somewhere_ as a monorepo, and the only question is how good your tooling is. How easy is it in your system to "run all tests properly depending on the set of changed files"? That's easy in Bazel and hard in every other solution I've seen (possible of course, but those sorts of constraints aren't the happy path for other build systems, so teams don't tend to build that way without a very solid lead imposing that strategy).
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] threadAs to the actual "why", even little things like BUILD files requiring you to enumerate dependency graphs gives you a leg up that you _can_ implement in other build systems, but likely won't. Whether you're a "monorepo" or not, you still have all your code living _somewhere_ as a monorepo, and the only question is how good your tooling is. How easy is it in your system to "run all tests properly depending on the set of changed files"? That's easy in Bazel and hard in every other solution I've seen (possible of course, but those sorts of constraints aren't the happy path for other build systems, so teams don't tend to build that way without a very solid lead imposing that strategy).
I don't get it, at all.
What should I read that will make me happier at having to use it?