[ihnorton]

Nix is likely a nonstarter because as far as I can tell it does not natively support Visual Studio and MSVC.

I suspect Bazel was ruled out because it requires the JVM and it has limited open source uptake relative to CMake (huge open source userbase), and Meson (limited presence in open source scientific software, but adopted by GNOME and systemd).

[mumblemumble]

I can't speak for scipy, but I ruled Bazel out for a project that included Python components a few years ago. It was great for C, C++, and Java projects, but, at least at the time, there was no official Python support. I looked into third-party options and the feasibility of building it myself. Most of what I found was a few different conference talks and blog posts where the presenter was enthusiastically talking about how they'd spent a year trying to get it to work and it's not quite there yet but they're feeling really really confident that they'll turn a corner sometime soon. But I could never find any subsequent evidence that the presenter's team actually had turned that corner.

Based on that, I just sort of assumed that, in addition to all the fairly well-documented up-front challenges that these folks had identified and were talking about, there must also be some impassable barrier lurking around in there that nobody finds until they've already sunk a lot of time and money into trying to get it working. I don't know what that is, and I'm not curious enough to spend the better part of a year trying to find it for myself. I ended up choosing Gradle.

[dfinninger]

Our team started moving to Bazel two years ago with 0.21 or something. Python support is much, much better these days. We’re building Python with requirements and packing it into Docker containers.

It went from “maybe run stdlib Python in an activated venv“ to actually working.

[mumblemumble]

That's great to hear. Yeah, 2 years ago would have been after I made this decision. Looking forward to taking another look at Bazel; I strenuously wanted it to be the one.

[prpl]

What was your artifacts and what did you choose instead?