[jamesblonde]

Add "bazel" to this growing list. Blaze (the real thing) is a great build tool, the best. But they kept the distributed engine for themselves, rendering Bazel useless. So far, they have done the same thing with TensorFlow - kept the distributed engine proprietary.

[melted]

I wouldn't call it "useless". It's less useful than the internal distributed version, sure, but it does offer value: a drop dead simple build file syntax that can be learned in 15 minutes and then just works.

[jamesblonde]

Useless is a bit harsh, but judging by Bazel's uptake, that's the "market's" take on Bazel.

[melted]

What did you expect, it's only been a few months. There's tremendous inertia when it comes to build systems, people don't change them on a whim.

[serge2k]

With the fancy distributed bits what's the win I get using Bazel? Maybe it's simpler, but if I already know another system then why switch?

[melted]

Simple, repeatable builds, almost no learning curve. I do agree that this is a vastly less potent value proposition than "build your C++ in minutes instead of hours", but it's a start. I think Google will offer the distributed cloud piece for this at some point. They'd be stupid not to.

[nl]

It takes years for a new build format to be widely used.

There are many more important thing holding up wider adoption before the lack of distributed support becomes a issue: Windows support, how hard it is to get working on ARM, etc etc.

TensorFlow is it's own thing.

[sgt101]

This seems to be a big problem for some people, but if you can stick 8 GPUs in a box with two 12 core CPU's and a 450000 IIOPS TB "disk" it seems to me that you have something interesting for Tensorflowing over.