Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity? There used to be a number of really popular and widely used projects such as closure compiler, gwt/j2cl, guava and other Java libs, and supposedly lots of golang stuff (not to speak of k8s where people seem to be satisfied it's a black box) that are dying behind bazel walls.
> Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity?
For other users, you might peruse the Bazelcon 2025 schedule, which happened earlier this month: https://bazelcon2025.sched.com/
Open source projects? Maybe less so.
But there are definitely companies that use Bazel in a major way.
I wish tools like CMake and Bazel simply used Lua, Python or JavaScript for their configuration instead of making their own languages with numerous quirks. There's literally no benefit of doing that.
Buck 1 used Python directly and it had lots of issues compared to Starlark.
Bazel uses Starlark, which is pretty much a deterministic subset of Python. Using Python directly would not be a good idea.
Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity? There used to be a number of really popular and widely used projects such as closure compiler, gwt/j2cl, guava and other Java libs, and supposedly lots of golang stuff (not to speak of k8s where people seem to be satisfied it's a black box) that are dying behind bazel walls.
> Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity?
Yes. For instance, Stripe uses Bazel internally for ~all of its builds. https://stripe.com/blog/fast-secure-builds-choose-two
For other users, you might peruse the Bazelcon 2025 schedule, which happened earlier this month: https://bazelcon2025.sched.com/
Open source projects? Maybe less so.
But there are definitely companies that use Bazel in a major way.
I wish tools like CMake and Bazel simply used Lua, Python or JavaScript for their configuration instead of making their own languages with numerous quirks. There's literally no benefit of doing that.
Buck 1 used Python directly and it had lots of issues compared to Starlark.
Bazel uses Starlark, which is pretty much a deterministic subset of Python. Using Python directly would not be a good idea.