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by joshuamorton 1429 days ago
> (Sure, I'll give you that it's better than Make, but is it faster than the Go compiler?)

It depends on what you're doing. If you're compiling pure go code that's truly only go, no go build will be faster. But if you have cgo or generated code or generated data or config files or...then well maybe you want something that is more flexible. And of course if you aren't building just go, then things get complicated fast. What if you have a backend and a frontend? `go test` probably isn't running your webdriver tests that compile your typescript somewhere in the build pipeline. Having a unified toolchain with one command (`blaze test //...`) is valuable compared to various test.sh (or make layered on top of n independent build systems or...)

And of course if you're like me and need to do things that involve reasoning or searching about code and dependencies, blaze is super necessary. "Find all of the dependencies of this file and test only those" is a question that most build tools aren't even remotely equipped to answer.

So in polyglot situations, bazel and similar prevail I think, but there's absolutely a point below which you don't care (and that point is going to be basically only hit by applications, not libraries).