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Comment by di4na | Hacker News Reader

Because the outside world is diverse and open source does not have the ressources to write bazel rules. Nor does it fit their history.

There is definitely a need for better (and Meson is the foss answer, as well as Shake). But Bazel need a context that OpenSource do not have. Time and a clean slate of dependencies cooperating.

Also noone fund tools for DX for OpenSource devs :) only for JS and even that...

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> Because the outside world is diverse and open source does not have the ressources to write bazel rules.

But the open source world has the resources to write new build systems (and ecosystems!) time and time again. This argument does not hold up.

Not really. Some open source projects go back a long long time and have a large enough build system that rewriting it would require a lot of effort. Other open source projects are small enough that the simplest build system the author(s) could build was good enough.

> But the open source world has the resources to write new build systems (and ecosystems!) time and time again.

What leads you to believe that writing new build systems is a popular hobby?

I mean, cmake is the de facto standard for C++ projects and it has been for what? Over a decade? What does this tell you?

The standard suite of open sourced Bazel rules are powerful enough for 99% of use cases. I have seen people argue this isn’t true, or that a rules package is fundamentally broken, but then learn that they are holding it wrong. And that holding it wrong reveals some glaring issues with how they setup their build system.

It’s not solely the user’s responsibility to hold it right. But Bazel is and has been developed in the “open source context” for long enough now that your argument doesn’t hold up imo.

If people hold it wrong so much, the tool is not adapted to the users. By definition

These people hold other build tools wrong too. The difference is those other build tools often have no way of being held correctly. That Bazel is possible to use correctly at all explains why it was copied at least twice (Buck and Pants) before it was open sourced.

And yet noone use neither of them in this world. Maybe we should realise that if none of them can be hold right when people use them, it is because they are not adapted to the use.

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