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Comment by prpl | Hacker News Reader

I’ve successfully used LLMs to migrate Makefiles to bazel, more or less. I’ve not tried the reverse but suspect (2) isn’t so bad these days. YMMV, of course, but food for thought

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Dunno why you got downvoted, but I've also tried to let Claude translate a bunch of BUILD files to equivalent CMakeLists.txt. It worked. The resulting CMakeLists.txt looks super terrible, but so is 95% of CMakeLists.txt in this world, so why bother, it's doomed anyway.

They got downvoted because 1) comments of the form "I gave a chat bot a toy example of a task and it managed it" are tired and uninformative, and 2) because nobody was talking about anything which would make translating a Makefile into Bazel somehow relevant, nobody here has a Makefile which we wish was Bazel, we wish Google code was easier to work with

The person above was saying they did a tedious manual port of tcmalloc to buck. Since tcmalloc provides both bazel and cmake builds, it seems relevant that in these days a person could have potentially forced a robot to do the job of writing the buck file given the cmake or bazel files.

People are discussing things that are tedious work. I think the conversion to Bazel from a makefile is much more tedious and error prone than the reverse, in part because of Bazel sandboxing although that shouldn’t make much of a difference for a well-defined collection of Makefiles of a C library.

The reverse should be much easier, which was the point of the post. Pointing it out as a capability (translation of build systems) that is handled well, is, well, informative. The future isn’t evenly distributed and people aren’t always aware of capabilities, even on HN

What's really tedious is the constant chat bot spam.

Yep I've done something similar. This is the only way I managed to compile Google's C++ S2 library (spatial indexing) which depends on absl and OpenSSL.

(I managed to avoid infecting my project with boringSSL)

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