rules_js

This comment gives off the impression that bazel just wraps cargo/pip/npm invocations, which is incorrect (at least in the commonly used scenarios) First of all, bazel does not handle any of these languages/ecosystems itself. Such logic is delegated to language-specific rulesets, of which there are multiple implementations with different tradeoffs. For python - https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_py parses a UV lockfile and does not use either UV or pip at build time. For rust - https://github.com/hermeticbuild/rules_rs parses the cargo lockfiles but does not invoke cargo for compilation. For js, https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_js parses the pnpm lockfile but does not invoke npm or pnpm at build time in the commonly used configurations. While it's true that bazel allows to patch all dependencies on the fly, in my experience many B

It's not about the package managers not being polyglot. It's about, for example, witnessing that `pip install` installs binaries with absolute paths and then writing a patch _for pip_ that Bazel uses, instead of figuring out how to change upstream pip to make that a configuration bit that Bazel uses. Bazel uses npm/cargo/pip in most people's usage of these tools! People still use these packages managers, with random patches and tweaks (because the overall ecosystem assumes you're using them). But Bazel often includes random fixups in their own tools. For example [0] is some patches Bazel does to node to get it to play nicely witH Bazel. In an (IMO) better world Bazel people figure out what they need, and figure out what they can get upstreamed into node to get things working. Instead we have patches that (if you jump through the history)

It’s funny I’ve been looking at industrial strength build systems like Bazel (language independent build tool from Google) recently the past few months just to get an idea of how things work in that world. One of the things happening in that community at the moment was their second major attempt to bring the JavaScript / Typescript and Node ecosystem onboard as a semi official language. It has been a 4 year effort so far and they had to make a bunch of compromises along the way as you can see in the design section of the projects readme here https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_js Watching the walls they would continually run into where the answer would essentially be “Node is very unlike other language runtimes” was illuminating and I suddenly started to understand why projects like Deno want to actually leave Node behind as a fundament

I also think it is partly as the tooling is not there yet - especially in the typical case when a project depends on lots of external dependencies. I am looking forward to new set of bazel rules being worked on for eg. https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_js and https://github.com/jvolkman/rules_pycross which will makes it more idiomatic to work with existing language ecosystems.