The next generation of Bazel builds

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Bazel’s public announcement so this is the perfect moment to reflect on what the next generation of build systems in the Bazel ecosystem may look like. I write this with the inspiration that comes from attending the first ever conference on Buildbarn, one of the many remote execution systems for Bazel. In the conference, Ed Schouten, the creator of Buildbarn, presented Bonanza: a skunkworks reimagination of Bazel for truly large builds. In this article, I want to dive into what Bonanza is and what similar projects to “replace Bazel” have existed. To get there though, we need to start first with a critique of the current implementation of Bazel. Problems scaling up The predecessor to Bazel, Blaze, is a build system designed at Google for Google’s monorepo scale. Blaze grew over the years assuming: that every engineer had a beefy workstation under their desk; that remote execution was expected to be used by default; that the remote execution clu ... Read full article.