rules_js

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.