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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Version Control
  4. Version Control System
  5. Bazel vs Git

Bazel vs Git

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Git
Git
Stacks343.7K
Followers184.2K
Votes6.6K
GitHub Stars57.1K
Forks26.9K
Bazel
Bazel
Stacks313
Followers579
Votes133

Bazel vs Git: 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; Git: Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Bazel and Git are primarily classified as "Java Build" and "Version Control System" tools respectively.

"Fast" is the top reason why over 18 developers like Bazel, while over 1441 developers mention "Distributed version control system" as the leading cause for choosing Git.

Bazel and Git are both open source tools. It seems that Git with 27.9K GitHub stars and 16.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bazel with 12.2K GitHub stars and 2K GitHub forks.

Netflix, Asana, and Quora are some of the popular companies that use Git, whereas Bazel is used by Asana, Square, and Google. Git has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3891 company stacks & 4632 developers stacks; compared to Bazel, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Advice on Git, Bazel

Kamaldeep
Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

SVN is much simpler than git for the simple stuff (checking in files and updating them when everyone's online), and much more complex than git for the complicated stuff (branching and merging). Or put another way, git's learning curve is steep up front, and then increases moderately as you do weird things; SVN's learning curve is very shallow up front and then increases rapidly.

If you're storing large files, if you're not branching, if you're not storing source code, and if your team is happy with SVN and the workflow you have, I'd say you should stay on SVN.

If you're writing source code with a relatively modern development practice (developers doing local builds and tests, pre-commit code reviews, preferably automated testing, preferably some amount of open-source code), you should move to git for two reasons: first, this style of working inherently requires frequent branching and merging, and second, your ability to interact with outside projects is easier if you're all comfortable with git instead of snapshotting the outside project into SVN.

83.3k views83.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Git
Git
Bazel
Bazel

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

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.

-
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
Statistics
GitHub Stars
57.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
26.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
343.7K
Stacks
313
Followers
184.2K
Followers
579
Votes
6.6K
Votes
133
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1429
    Distributed version control system
  • 1053
    Efficient branching and merging
  • 959
    Fast
  • 843
    Open source
  • 726
    Better than svn
Cons
  • 16
    Hard to learn
  • 11
    Inconsistent command line interface
  • 9
    Easy to lose uncommitted work
  • 8
    Worst documentation ever possibly made
  • 5
    Awful merge handling
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
    Lack of Documentation
  • 1
    Constant breaking changes
  • 1
    Learning Curve
Integrations
No integrations available
Java
Java
Objective-C
Objective-C
C++
C++

What are some alternatives to Git, Bazel?

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.

Mercurial

Mercurial

Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds.

SVN (Subversion)

SVN (Subversion)

Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.

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.

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM is a distributed version control designed for big projects. It excels on branching and merging, graphical user interfaces, and can also deal with large files and even file-locking (great for game devs). It includes "semantic" features like refactor detection to ease diffing complex refactors.

Pijul

Pijul

Pijul is a free and open source (AGPL 3) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.

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.

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