[rfoo]

Dunno why you got downvoted, but I've also tried to let Claude translate a bunch of BUILD files to equivalent CMakeLists.txt. It worked. The resulting CMakeLists.txt looks super terrible, but so is 95% of CMakeLists.txt in this world, so why bother, it's doomed anyway.

[mort96]

They got downvoted because 1) comments of the form "I gave a chat bot a toy example of a task and it managed it" are tired and uninformative, and 2) because nobody was talking about anything which would make translating a Makefile into Bazel somehow relevant, nobody here has a Makefile which we wish was Bazel, we wish Google code was easier to work with

[jeffbee]

The person above was saying they did a tedious manual port of tcmalloc to buck. Since tcmalloc provides both bazel and cmake builds, it seems relevant that in these days a person could have potentially forced a robot to do the job of writing the buck file given the cmake or bazel files.

[prpl]

People are discussing things that are tedious work. I think the conversion to Bazel from a makefile is much more tedious and error prone than the reverse, in part because of Bazel sandboxing although that shouldn’t make much of a difference for a well-defined collection of Makefiles of a C library.

The reverse should be much easier, which was the point of the post. Pointing it out as a capability (translation of build systems) that is handled well, is, well, informative. The future isn’t evenly distributed and people aren’t always aware of capabilities, even on HN

[mort96]

What's really tedious is the constant chat bot spam.