Comment by mgaunard

15 hours ago

I have several times built my own system to do just that when it wasn't even my main job. Doesn't take more than a couple of days.

Bazel is certainly not the solution; it's arguably closer to being the problem. The worst build system I have ever seen was Bazel-based.

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mgaunard

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maccard  6 hours ago

> I have several times built my own system to do just that when it wasn't even my main job. Doesn't take more than a couple of days.

Really? I'd love a link to even something that works as a toy project

> Bazel is certainly not the solution; it's arguably closer to being the problem. The worst build system I have ever seen was Bazel-based.

I agree

  • mgaunard  4 hours ago

    It usually ends up somewhat non-generic, with project-specific decisions hardcoded rather than specified in a config file.

    I usually make it so that it's fully integrated with wherever we store artifacts (for CAS), source (to download specific revisions as needed), remote running (which depending on the shop can be local, docker, ssh, kubernetes, ...), GDB, IDEs... All that stuff takes more work for a truly generic solution, and it's generally more valuable to have tight integration for the one workflow you actually use.

    Since I also control the build image and toolchain (that I build from source) it also ends up specifically tied to that too.

    In practice, I find that regardless of what generic tool you use like cmake or bazel, you end up layering your own build system and workflow scripts on top of those tools anyway. At some point I decided the complexity and overhead of building on top of bazel was more trouble than it was worth, while building it from scratch is actually quite easy and gives you all the control you could possibly need.