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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Java Build Tools
  5. Bazel vs Mill

Bazel vs Mill

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Bazel
Bazel
Stacks314
Followers579
Votes133
Mill
Mill
Stacks3
Followers4
Votes0

Bazel vs Mill: What are the differences?

Bazel: Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone. 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; Mill: Simple, modern build tool for Scala and Java. It is your shiny new Java/Scala build tool. It aims for simplicity by re-using concepts you are already familiar with, borrowing ideas from modern tools like Bazel, to let you build your projects in a way that's simple, fast, and predictable.

Bazel and Mill belong to "Java Build Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Bazel are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, Mill provides the following key features:

  • Simple
  • Fast
  • Modern

Bazel is an open source tool with 14.7K GitHub stars and 2.53K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bazel's open source repository on GitHub.

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Detailed Comparison

Bazel
Bazel
Mill
Mill

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.

It is your shiny new Java/Scala build tool. It aims for simplicity by re-using concepts you are already familiar with, borrowing ideas from modern tools like Bazel, to let you build your projects in a way that's simple, fast, and predictable.

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
Simple;Fast;Modern;Works with scala
Statistics
Stacks
314
Stacks
3
Followers
579
Followers
4
Votes
133
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 28
    Fast
  • 20
    Deterministic incremental builds
  • 17
    Correct
  • 16
    Multi-language
  • 14
    Enforces declared inputs/outputs
Cons
  • 3
    No Windows Support
  • 2
    Bad IntelliJ support
  • 1
    Constant breaking changes
  • 1
    Lack of Documentation
  • 1
    Learning Curve
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Java
Java
Objective-C
Objective-C
C++
C++
Docker
Docker
Java
Java
Scala
Scala
Windows
Windows
Mac OS X
Mac OS X
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
Arch Linux
Arch Linux

What are some alternatives to Bazel, Mill?

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Gradle

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Pants

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.

JitPack

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Apache Ant

Apache Ant

Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

Please

Please

Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproduceability. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

CMake

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.

Sonatype Nexus

Sonatype Nexus

It is an open source repository that supports many artifact formats, including Docker, Java™ and npm. With the Nexus tool integration, pipelines in your toolchain can publish and retrieve versioned apps and their dependencies

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