Hello, Bazel

Yesterday, my team open-sourced Bazel, the build system Google uses for most of its software. We have been working on open-sourcing Bazel for over a year, extricating dependencies, renaming and refactoring, and jumping through legal and political hoops. We were still missing a lot of stuff we wanted to add, but we thought it would be useful to get a less complete project out there and start getting some feedback from “friends and family.” So we hit the “make public” button on Github and IM-ed some friends. “We on Hacker News yet?” someone joked. We checked. We were. Over the next half-hour, we rose to #1 on Hacker News and stayed there all day. Twitter exploded with hundreds of tweets about Bazel and we started getting a constant stream of issues and pull requests. Our “press the button on GitHub” meeting turned into an all-day war room, responding to users and fixing documentation and setup issues.

It was exhilarating and amazing. I knew that a lot of people were excited to try Bazel, but this response has exceeded all of my expectations.

I hope that everyone will bear with us as we work the kinks out. Hugely important missing pieces that I can think of off the top of my head:

• No binaries available – you have to compile from source.
• No externally available continuous integration – no guarantee the code is actually compiling.
• Terrible setup process – you have to manually add a WORKSPACE file and symlink the tools/ directory to make your project buildable with Bazel.

Please do give Bazel a try if you’re interested, give us feedback, and, if you hate it now, give it another try in a couple of months when we actually launch!