[steeve]

It is true that you rarely start with a new build system.

Bazel is hard in the same way Rust is hard. If you port your existing project to it, chances are you will run into issues because you were doing things wrong with respect to hermeticity or reproducibility. It goes really far to make things correct. You may not need it, but when you do it’s a godsend. Or at least it was for a lot of people I talked to. And my own experience as well.

If your project is vanilla enough, things will go mostly smoothly and the benefit will be immediate (ie bazel clean is a legend).

Think of Bazel as a framework. If you do thing its way, it will spoil up. But sometimes a framework is not what you need. That said, if you’re happy with your current system, then good for you!

[jacquesm]

I just don't see a new company starting up that one day will need Bazel doing that with Bazel. There is just too much overhead, you won't ever become that company that needs Bazel if you start out that way.

[steeve]

That is a bold statement.

This is not only related to the size of the company but rather the size of the project. For instance if the project requires polyglot build or codegen (gRPC does both for instance), Bazel will shine and save a lot of time and headaches.

That’s not to say that it’s without its problems and that some use cases are very rough around the edges. Which is something the team and community are working to fix.