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by pjc50 1116 days ago
Is bazel build distributed? distcc lets you use a lot of machines to speed up the wallclock-time of your compilation.
3 comments
sluongng 1116 days ago
Not only it's distributed like distcc, Bazel also provide sandboxing to ensure that environment factors does not affect the build/test results. This might not mean much for smaller use cases, but at scale with different compiler toolchains targeting different OS and CPU Architecture, the sandbox helps a ton in keeping your build result accurate so that it could be cached remotely (like using ccache).

On top of it, the APIs Bazel uses to communicate with the remote execution environment is standardized and adopted by other build tools with multiple server implementation to match it. Looking into https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis/#clients, you could see big players are involved: Meta, Twitter, Chromium project, Bloomberg while there are commercial supports for some server implementations.

Finally, on top of C/C++, Bazel also supports these remote compilation / remote test execution for Go, Java, Rust, JS/TS etc... Which matters a lot for many enterprise users.

Disclaimer: I work for https://www.buildbuddy.io/ which provides one of the remote execution server implementation and I am a contributor to Bazel.

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DrBazza 1116 days ago
It can be. By default it is local.

But it has protobufs interfaces (IIRC), so a distributed build farm would generate the grpc endpoints for their implementation and then you tell bazel on the command line (or via .bazelrc) the address of the build farm it can use.

There's a couple of projects that implement the distributed/grpc part, the main one is https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

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ReleaseCandidat 1116 days ago
> Is bazel build distributed?

Yes, that's the main feature of Bazel. And it caches the generated files. Although you could do theoretically cache using ccache with distcc.

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jeffbee 1116 days ago
I doubt that it is the main feature. RBE is difficult to deploy and consequently rarely used. On the other hand of you assume that 99% of bazel invocations are done by google, then weighted that way RBE is nearly universal.
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