Blaze/Bazel has its flaws (including poor integration into the world outside google), but what are you comparing it against? Any general purpose build system I've seen that is not bazel based and not nix is a flaming pile of garbage: almost nothing else can even figure out a correct dependency tree, let alone which parts of it have changed and need recompilation. Bazel also uses a familiar, readable and yet concise subset of python for build description, whereas most other build systems use customer languages with syntaxes and semantics that are comically bad if you don't have to use them and tragically so if you do.

Again, gRPC has its flaws (and I'm not a fan of HTTP2), but what are you comparing it to? For internal services REST is acceptable for extremely simple, stable and low volume APIs. For everything else it is an obvious disaster: terrible CPU/network/memory performance, you need to write more code than you would have to with gRPC and get zero type safety unless you add some json schema monstrosity on top of it at which point your performance will likely take a further nose dive. Also, good luck evolving the protocol – gRPC is carefully designed to support this. Far from doing a good job, "TFA" quotes some extremely clueless article on why protobuf sucks that was ripped to shreds when posted on HN previously.

The only compelling alternative to gRPC I am aware of is capnproto (which is derivative, but in some ways nicer), but it has far less eco system maturity and mindshare.

> The only compelling alternative to gRPC I am aware of is capnproto (which is derivative, but in some ways nicer)

I would argue that while Cap'n Proto's serialization is derivative of Protobuf, the RPC protocol is wildly different from gRPC.

> but it has far less eco system maturity and mindshare.

That's certainly true.

(I'm the author of Cap'n Proto.)

Yes, sorry I was imprecise, it would have been better to have written "derivative of protobuf". To the extent the RPC part is derivative, it's probably mostly derivative of E?

Yep, that I will agree with!

I'm going to recommend at this point, you take a breather from your invective, cool off for a bit, and return when you have something valuable to contribute. You're going to have to do better when commenting on Hacker News: you're just attacking stuff because you don't like it, rather than making technical explanations.

> Bazel is fucking awful. Most miserable years of my career is when I was tasked with maintaining a build system based on it. Same for gRPC, which TFA also does a good job of shutting down.

Counter-anecdata: my most miserable years of my career were when dealing with bespoke build and API systems that weren't Bazel and gRPC.

Bzl is the most advanced build system on earth tbh. I have yet to see anything that compares for large-scale C++ development.