I quit my last job in no small part because of Bazel. I hated it so much. It tortured me.
I think Bazel is the kind of really complicated language that invites clever engineers to build incomprehensible balls of spaghetti. And the tooling and docs are really underinvested in.
But I got a new job, and to my surprise I've been doing Bazel all day. And I love it. I don't really know why.
All this to say, don't make a final judgement yet, there's something brilliant buried underneath that pile of rules and aspects.
Bazel confused the hell out of me at first, and I think the two-phase execution model (the “plan-execute pattern” as I called it) is to blame.
My favorite thing about Bazel is how easy it is to get stuff done if somebody sets up the rules for you. Copy-paste a code snippet and fiddle with the dependency list until it works.
But as soon as you go deeper, you get overwhelmed with new concepts, and the documentation doesn’t explain them well enough. I think this huge spike in complexity makes people hate Bazel, especially if their colleagues force it on them, breaking the usual workflows.
I don’t love Bazel, but it’s the build system I hate the least. And it taught me a lot.
I work on a couple sets of rules at Google. I enjoy it. Though I agree people really can make balls of spaghetti with it. Everyone’s macros are terrible except for mine . The configuration system is where things can get really out of hand: transitions, selects, flags, etc.
agree - what's more, the author is really talking about blaze, where everything "just works" because there are massive dedicated resources maintaining it. He literally admits that he likes the copy-pasta-no-think-about-it:
> Surprisingly, I didn’t need to fiddle with blaze, nor did I have to understand how it worked. I could copy some build targets and edit the dependency list, and the build worked as expected.
Sure, systems that just work are great, until they break.
bazel on the other hand, not so much. Heaven help you if it doesn't support your use-cases - you will wish you had Google to maintain your build.
