[boris]

There is build2. It has "high-fidelity" (instead of hermetic) builds meaning that besides sources it keeps track of changes to options, compilers, etc. This gives you similar benefits at a fraction of the cost. There is no distributed compilation or caching yet but it's coming. In other benefits, it doesn't need Java or Python (or any other "platform").

[vlovich123]

Assuming you didn't actually care about hermetic builds, the challenge with build2 is that it's c++ only AFAIK. Larger orgs turn into polyglot scenarios (python/bash for scripting/gluing things together, Go for web services, C/C++ for high performance code, now Rust, etc).

You can of course try to use the native solution on each but that makes it more difficult for people to jump between projects/languages as the syntax for describing the build changes. Moreover for centralized build infra this becomes more difficult to orchestrate/co-ordinate because now you have to add remote caching/parallel compilation & whatnot to multiple places (with all the associated challenges of trying to upstream the same set of logical changes into many different projects with their own maintenance schedules/philosophies).

[ajconway]

One of the main benefits of Bazel (and similar systems) is that you get a build cache that you can mostly trust. When you have a project that takes an hour or more to build and test, and lots of machines to run a distributed build, it really makes a difference.

If you have a small project that you can rebuild in a couple of minutes, Bazel is probably an overkill.