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Comment by steeve | Hacker News Reader

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steeve·

Had to build bazel from scratch, you need:

- a previous version of Bazel

- GCC/Clang

- JDK

- Python

- Zip and Unzip

Not sure I'd call that "huge". Perhaps the JDK?

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> you need:

> - a previous version of Bazel

Why do all these systems seem to need to prove Goedel's theorem? What is wrong with providing a tool that builds portably with a simple C compiler?

Since GP said bootstrapping rather than just building... where do you get that previous version of Bazel?

From the bazel releases. It always starts with a binary.

I mean sure, you always need to start with a binary somewhere, but to put this into perspective... the binaries needed to bootstrap all the software on the distro I run on my laptop weigh in at about 60 MiB[0]. An x86_64 build of Bazel alone weighs in at about 27 MiB[1]. As someone who cares about source bootstrappability, that feels like sliding backwards.

I suppose you may be able to find a chain of older versions of Bazel starting with one that doesn't require Bazel itself to build, like the Guix devs did for Rust[2].

[0] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstra...

[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/tag/3.5.0

[2] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/

There are two supported ways of building a Bazel binary. One uses an existing Bazel, this other uses a bash script that calls the compilers.

And compare that to a few hundred bytes to bootstrap the whole Guix system.

He was talking about bootstrapping. But anyway, JDK and Python? Really?

Bazel is in Java...

Bazel is written in C++ and Java. The compile.sh (and the root of the repository) uses bash and probably a few other binaries. What are the issues exactly? Please file a bug if you have issues bootstrapping Bazel (it's not a need for most users, so the process might not be perfect).

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