[ttiurani]

Seconded. I tried hard to use Bazel in a polyglot repo because I really wanted just one builder.

Unfortunately, the amount of work you need to just maintain the build across language and bazel version upgrades is incredibly high. Let alone adding new build steps, or going even slightly off the well-trodded path.

I feel like Bazel would need at least 5 more full-time engineers to eventually turn it into an actually usable build tool outside Big Tech. Right now many critical open source Bazel rules get a random PR every now and then from people who don't actually (have time to) care about the open source community.

My go-to now is to use mise + just to glue together build artifacts from every language's standard build tools. It's not great but at least I get to spend time on programming instead of fixing the build.

[manmal]

Is the reason that it works for big tech that those can spare dozens of engineers to make it work?

[yupsurprise]

Yes, each of the big techs has teams that just work on the build systems, however it should also be noted that none of the big tech use the open source Bazel, Google uses Blaze internally which is what Bazel is derived from, Amazon uses Brazil which has nothing to do with Bazel and Meta uses Buck, which I know nothing of so I won't comment on it.

The major issue I found when trying to use Bazel was that its essentially a build system without specific rules for each language, hence rules support for each specific language is dependant on each language's specific community, most of which are quite tiny, and mostly maintained by upstreaming changes from their individual companies, servicing their own needs, hence a lot of work is required to make it work for your own company's needs.

[mgaunard]

Big Tech are large organizations with different needs than that of small organizations.

They care about setting standards over widely different teams and managing large-scale upgrades etc.

It's not optimized for velocity or cost efficiency, which is what a smaller organization needs.

[manmal]

But it doesn’t sound standardized at all if so much customization work is needed.