[badoongi]

> I can run our entire backend with a single command that will work on any developer's box.

Curious wouldn't `go run` give you the same? pure go code is supposed to be portable, unless you have cgo deps I guess?

> I can push a reproducible Docker image to Kubernetes with a single Bazel command.

That's definitely an upside over what would otherwise would probably default to a combination of Dockerfiles and scripts/Makefiles, does it worth bringing in the massive thing that is Bazel? depends I guess.

I'm curious: would you say your experience with golang IDEs / gopls is degraded? did you do anything special to make it good? I often feel like development is more clunky and often I just give up on the nice-to-haves of a language server e.g often some dependencies in the IDE aren't properly indexed, I can probably get Bazel to do some fetching, reindex and get it working, but it will take 3-4 minutes and I just often choose to live with the thing appearing as "broken" in the IDE and getting less IDE features.

[sa46]

> Curious wouldn't `go run` give you the same?

We use protobufs and pggen. Bazel transparently manages the codegen from proto file to Go code.

> would you say your experience with golang IDEs / gopls is degraded?

Yes, that's our biggest pain point with Go and Bazel. I haven't been able to coax IntelliJ into debugging Bazel managed binaries. To enable IntelliJ code analysis, we copy the generated code into the src directory (with a Bazel rule auto-generated by Gazelle) but don't add it to Git.

I've tried the IntelliJ with Bazel plugin a few times but I've always reverted back to stock IntelliJ.