What is Bazel?
Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
Bazel is a tool in the Java Build Tools category of a tech stack.
Bazel is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Bazel's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Bazel?
Companies
35 companies reportedly use Bazel in their tech stacks, including Google, Asana, and Square.
Developers
238 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Bazel.
Bazel Integrations
Java, C++, Objective-C, Kind, and Trunk are some of the popular tools that integrate with Bazel. Here's a list of all 6 tools that integrate with Bazel.
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Decisions about Bazel
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Bazel in their tech stack.
Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 2 upvotes · 339.2K views
All Java-Projects are compiled using Apache Maven. We prefer it over Apache Ant and Gradle as it combines lightweightness with feature-richness and offers basically all we can imagine from a software project-management tool and more. We're open however to re-evaluate this decision in favor of Gradle or Bazel in the future if we feel like we're missing out on anything.
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Bazel's Features
- Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages
- High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations
- Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones
- Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result
- Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Bazel Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Bazel?
Pants
Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.
Webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Buck
Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.
CMake
It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice.
