I find it hard to buy into one of these "mega build system" ecosystems because there are so many competing tools that descend from Blaze: Bazel, Pants, Buck, Buck2, etc. The migration path to these systems takes substantial effort, so I wouldn't want to bet on the wrong one and have to do it all again a few years later. I'm content to wait patiently for Bazel or Buck2 to clearly win before I invest.
I have the sense that migrating to any hermetic, cacheable build system will be more effort than migrating from one to another: once a project is “safe” to have everything run in sandboxes, the mechanisms for setting up those sandboxes is less important. For example, once one system has accurate dependency information, that can be used as a base for setting up the second system (and presumably this info can be exported for machine-assisted migration).
Of course, the details of each system differ enough that I imagine it’s not trivial.
It seems to be quite active, with regular new releases. I’m lead to believe that https://www.toolchain.com/ is the main sponsor, but there are maintainers from other companies too. I do not know the details, though.
I find it hard to buy into one of these "mega build system" ecosystems because there are so many competing tools that descend from Blaze: Bazel, Pants, Buck, Buck2, etc. The migration path to these systems takes substantial effort, so I wouldn't want to bet on the wrong one and have to do it all again a few years later. I'm content to wait patiently for Bazel or Buck2 to clearly win before I invest.