Re:Bazel Build System Support for LLVM
by klodolph on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @10:35PM
(#24926490)
> The official .deb is 156MB compressed, which is prohibitive for all but the largest OSS projects.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement. Why is 156MB prohibitive? You don't need to include Bazel in the project any more than you need to include Xcode for the macOS version of a project. You can specify a version of Bazel with .bazelversion so you don't need to worry so much about people using the wrong Bazel.
There are some systems like Waf and Autotools where the build system is customarily bundled inside the source release, but this is not universal--if you use CMake, it's almost certainly not bundled either.
> Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Android is a fairly large project itself consisting of the Kernel (which has got its own custom build system) and a ton of different components. From what I understand, for NDK projects, Bazel is moving towards "the one sane way to do things", it will just take time, this stuff doesn't happen overnight. For non-NDK (pure Java or Kotlin) projects, there's not really a point.
Chromium is a bit of a special snowflake and predates Bazel's Windows support, and a codebase the size of Chromium would take a long time to migrate--but it looks like it's heading in that direction. From what I can see in the revisions to the Chromium build system, it seems that it's massive custom build system is moving towards Bazel by leaps and bounds. It's already structured like a Bazel project and uses much of the same terminology, I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred Bazel scripts appear overnight in Chrome, because it looks like much of the groundwork has been done.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement. Why is 156MB prohibitive? You don't need to include Bazel in the project any more than you need to include Xcode for the macOS version of a project. You can specify a version of Bazel with .bazelversion so you don't need to worry so much about people using the wrong Bazel.
There are some systems like Waf and Autotools where the build system is customarily bundled inside the source release, but this is not universal--if you use CMake, it's almost certainly not bundled either.
> Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Android is a fairly large project itself consisting of the Kernel (which has got its own custom build system) and a ton of different components. From what I understand, for NDK projects, Bazel is moving towards "the one sane way to do things", it will just take time, this stuff doesn't happen overnight. For non-NDK (pure Java or Kotlin) projects, there's not really a point.
Chromium is a bit of a special snowflake and predates Bazel's Windows support, and a codebase the size of Chromium would take a long time to migrate--but it looks like it's heading in that direction. From what I can see in the revisions to the Chromium build system, it seems that it's massive custom build system is moving towards Bazel by leaps and bounds. It's already structured like a Bazel project and uses much of the same terminology, I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred Bazel scripts appear overnight in Chrome, because it looks like much of the groundwork has been done.