[AtlasBarfed]

Is there, say, IntelliJ support for Bazel? Do you need a central server?

I've heard bazel is a bear...

But... all mature build systems are, because they become essentially enterprise workflow engines, process execution engines, internal systems integration hubs, and schedulers. Why? Because that's what an enterprise/mature build system is, it only differs from other software packages with the same capabilities in that it concentrates on build / deploy / CI "business tasks".

My current employer uses Jenkins (which has workflows/pipelines, daemons) and then feeds into Spinnaker (which has a full DAG workflow engine and interface) and likely this is pretty close to a "standard" or "best of breed" cloud build CI system. Of course there is a dedicated team.

Oh and of course the gradle code build in github has its own pipelines and general Turing machine to do whatever you want.

[jvolkman]

> Is there, say, IntelliJ support for Bazel?

Seems like JetBrains has recently committed to some amount of 1st-party Bazel support: https://twitter.com/ebenwert/status/1506683612518887425

And there's now a component in their tracker: https://hub.jetbrains.com/projects/Bazel

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, in my experience Bazel is painful, but I've prototyped my own build system before. There's no fundamental reason it has to be a pain, I think Bazel just made really strange decisions and didn't pay much thought to helping people find the happy path. When I looked into it at least, the documentation seemed to assume you've used Bazel or something like it before.

Jenkins isn't a solution because it doesn't understand the dependency graph and can't help you with things like incremental rebuilds. It's just a task runner component, which a distributed build tool would probably offer out of the box.

[klodolph]

I would be interested in understanding what you think Bazel's strange decisions are. Prior to Bazel, I had also used some of my own custom build systems--I was multiple rewrites into it--and I had independently come to some of the same conclusions as Bazel, such as the need for target syntax that separates the package name from the target name within the package (like how Bazel specifies targets as //dir/abc:def).

There are a number of other Bazel decisions that seemed strange until I tried to figure out how I would implement some particular feature.

My conclusion is that there are lots of small reasons why build systems are a pain in practice, and that the problem is a lot more complex than most people give it credit for.

[dastbe]

> Is there, say, IntelliJ support for Bazel?

there is, but it heavily depends on language. It also has issues/makes choices with transitive resolves for things like java/kotlin, so you might have something that builds but the depencency is not resolved in intellij for autocomplete.