(Former Blaze engineer and current Go tool builder here.)

Blaze's support for building Go source code predates the existence of the 'go' tool and uses very different conventions for package naming, directory layout, testing, and project organization. As a result, most Google Go code cannot be built with 'go'. This can be a source of frustration at times.

Is "Blaze" something else or an autocorrect/typo of "Bazel" (topic of this post)?

From the faq (http://bazel.io/faq.html):

Did you rewrite your internal tool as open-source? Is it a fork?

Bazel shares most of its code with the internal tool and its rules are used for millions of builds every day.

What's up with the word "Blaze" in the codebase?

This is an internal name for the tool. Please refer to Bazel as Bazel.

Blaze is the internal name of Bazel in Google (I don't know if both projects are identical, or if Blaze was just the "inspiration" for Bazel)

They refer to distinct things but share a lot of their code. Blaze doesn't contain anything that you would find useful, you need our infrastructure for its other features to work.

Blaze is the Google-internal thing. Bazel is its Open Source clone.

Go support is on the roadmap and is being tracked by this GitHub issue: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/79

If I recall correctly, there was something about one of the main motivations in creating Go was to simplify build systems (partly reduce file reads of duplicate header files), so I imagine "go build" was designed to work at Google's scale.

Also, apparently Bazel only contains like 10% of the build rules that Blaze has. Blaze being the internal version of Bazel. Some of those rules are Google specific, but I believe I read that some of them they would like to port (untangle from proprietary stuff) to Bazel, just haven't had the time to do so yet.