Yeah that's fair feedback. At this time, we consider ourselves more of a Bazel-lite than an actual Bazel replacement. Once we support more languages and features, this may change in the future.
I'm not trying to be overly critical here, in fact, I want to share the type of empathetic feedback I'd hope to receive as a founder.
Have you actually talked to Blaze/Bazel users to understand what frustrations (if any) they have with their current build system? Have these users asked for a Bazel-lite? If so, and you still want to position yourself as Bazel-lite, then you should include some of their direct feedback and write your messaging accordingly.
As a daily Blaze/Bazel user, I don't have a desire for a Bazel-lite. I've worked at a midsize company that used Bazel, and I'm working at the company that created Blaze/Bazel.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are my own; not representative of my employer.
Let me give them feedback in the vein of what you're asking for. I want the following as a user:
- Distributed cache of built artifacts. Work with my company's network topology and security requirements. Make this easy to setup, operate, and seamless for developers to opt into
- Seamless monorepo support (multiple languages)
That could be considered Bazel-lite. And yes, I'd take it over Bazel currently.
If you don't work at Google, convincing your engineering organization into learning Bazel is almost always a non-starter. Who uses Bazel in the wild? Xooglers primarily.
Off the top of my head, some companies that successfully use Bazel: SpaceX [1], Datadog [2], Databricks [3], Stripe [4], Uber [5], etc. That's a good 10k+ engineers using Bazel successfully in the wild. There's more, of course.
No one has, to my knowledge, argued that Bazel isn't useful or worthwhile. My point was adopting Bazel is costly for an engineering organization, and you may not need all of its features. Bazel-lite may be enough.
Large companies, with established platform / ops teams, who can support Bazel and push for its adoption within an engineering organization definitely exist. There's probably a few Xooglers working there who'd like to see it happen too.
> If you don't work at Google, convincing your engineering organization into learning Bazel is almost always a non-starter. Who uses Bazel in the wild? Xooglers primarily.
My response shows these hypotheses to be false. You’re correct, no one’s arguing whether Bazel is useful or worthwhile, not even I.
> Large companies […] who can support Basel within an engineering organization definitely exist.
Ok great, we agree. You’ve revised your point from earlier.
> There’s probably a few Xooglers […]
A baseless hypothesis that’s confirmed false by all the references shared with you. Feel free to plug all the lead engineers’ names into LinkedIn to verify that the majority are not ex-Google.
> Bazel-lite may be enough.
Sure, it may be. That’s why I’m offering the constructive feedback to go talk to the thousands of active Bazel users to see whether and what they want from a Bazel-lite, if that’s the positioning Moonrepo wants to choose.
Usually, there’s a strong rationale and need behind an organization’s adoption of Bazel. Some of that rationale is captured in the references shared earlier. These organizations need Bazel; they’re generally happier with Bazel than their previous systems. These baseline needs represent table stakes for any build system that wants to compete with Bazel.
If Moonrepo wants to compete where Bazel is weak, then I’m suggesting that they need to sharpen their communication such that an engineer well-versed in Bazel has an “aha!” moment within 2 minutes. The proverbial elevator pitch.
Once again, I’m not dissuading Moonrepo from pursuing their vision. I’m offering constructive feedback on their messaging/positioning — the type of feedback I’d like to hear as a founder.
... you seem highly invested in this so I'll humor you.
Even in my original reply:
> If you don't work at Google, convincing your engineering organization into learning Bazel is almost always a non-starter. Who uses Bazel in the wild? Xooglers primarily.
Emphasis on almost since you've missed it three replies now.
What are you even getting at here? I freely admit that some companies adopt Bazel. Many do not. You doing a Bing search to find the ones that do doesn't change that fact.
> Ok great, we agree. You’ve revised your point from earlier.
I haven't revised anything. You misread, but feel free to be needlessly hostile defending a product your current employer makes against a newly launched competitor. I use the word competitor loosely. It's not a good look either way.
> That’s why I’m offering the constructive feedback to go talk to the thousands of active Bazel users to see whether and what they want from a Bazel-lite, if that’s the positioning Moonrepo wants to choose.
Why would they need to talk to people who are actively using Bazel to see if they want Bazel-lite? It's a small population that's already, presumably, well served.
There's a whole other, much, much larger segment of customers who'd love to use Bazel-lite that aren't using Bazel, for many reasons, including the high cost of adopting and supporting it. I'm one of those customers. Unsure why this point escapes you.
Your advice, by the way comes off as attacking their idea and trying to tear it down regardless of how many times you preamble it's constructive criticism.
A lot of our decisions were based on our past experience with Bazel. We both have worked at companies that tried to use Bazel and failed miserably. There's stuff we like about Bazel (and copied in some capacity, like file groups), and definitely parts we hate about Bazel.
Bazel doesn't work well for every language, but for those languages that it does, it definitely makes sense to use Bazel. For those languages that work better with something more lightweight, that's where moon comes in. I'm assuming you work at Google, so you're experience around Bazel is probably much better than those that don't work at Google.
I appreciate all the feedback and comments though, very much appreciated.
I see that you are targetting the Web ecosystem. IMO using Bazel in this case was pretty tough, and may still be. The way Bazel does things may not make sense for 95% JS projects (and 99.9% FOSS projects), so I wonder whether it's better to simply drop the mention of Bazel. Just don't compare to Bazel.
Better “monorepo-ish” (whatever that means in the frontend world) tools are still valuable, but as GP said, it's pretty crowded here.
I don't know if you have talked with people working on C++ or Java projects (I see that these are not among your supported languages), but if you do, you get to see why people are talking about Bazel.
