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by joshuamorton 1429 days ago
Are you calling bazel a nonstandard single use pseudo language, but make a standard tool?

That's just an argument from tradition.

And you want sandboxing because that's what gets you good caching. The value of bazel is never having to run make clean because artifacts aren't correctly being built from cache. Having no distinction between clean and incremental builds is really nice.
1 comments
trasz 1428 days ago
That is an argument from tradition - which you yourself have brought up, calling Bazel a "standard way".

>The value of bazel is never having to run make clean because artifacts aren't correctly being built from cache.

You can get that with make(1) too, check out FreeBSD's META_MODE for one example. And it didn't require reinventing the wheel.

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joshuamorton 1428 days ago
> which you yourself have brought up, calling Bazel a "standard way".

I didn't do any such thing. My point is simply that make and bazel are similarly "nonstandard single use pseudo languages". In many ways, bazel is superior to make from a language perspective (it resembles other languages more closely, being a dialect of python, and avoids the loadbearing tab issue), so I think I could make the argument that bazel is in many ways less nonstandard, but make is certainly more common than bazel, so it could go either way.

> You can get that with make(1) too, check out FreeBSD's META_MODE for one example.

This suffers from the same issues that natural make does (notably the whole mtime thing). See https://apenwarr.ca/log/20181113 for a much better explanation than I can provide as to why make's entire model of "change" is irreparably broken, and why hash (+sandbox!) based approaches (which bazel and redo and nix and cargo and nearly every other modern build tool use) are far superior.

> And it didn't require reinventing the wheel.

You call inventing a new syscall to not-even-fully fix a limitation of the tool not reinventing the wheel? Like I guess its not, it's just like building a weird grand shrine around the broken wheel. It's far worse. I don't want to need to change my operating system to have make work better, but still worse than the alternatives. That's simply not a compelling argument.

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