WHwhs-dot-hk·Jan 21, 2021Submission
Use bazel rules_foreign_cc with these essential patches
1 points · Open discussionbazel-contrib
rules_foreign_cc
Starlark2018–2021
bazel-contrib / rules_foreign_cc
rules_foreign_cc
Build rules for interfacing with "foreign" (non-Bazel) build systems (CMake, configure-make, GNU Make, boost, ninja, Meson)
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
738GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Build rules for interfacing with "foreign" (non-Bazel) build systems (CMake, configure-make, GNU Make, boost, ninja, Meson)
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-11-14 23:47:48 UTC to 2021-01-21 11:35:38 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2018 | 2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Dec 2018 | 2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2019 | 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2019 | 2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2019 | 2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 2019 | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2019 | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2019 | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2019 | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2019 | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2019 | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2019 | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2019 | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2020 | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2020 | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2020 | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2020 | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 2020 | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesI'm a big fan of bazel. It's very similar to blaze, which outside of Google is a good and bad thing.
The good is that I find BUILD files easier to read/reason about than Makefiles and it also is multilingual.
The bad is external dependency is hard, especially if you want to take advantage of all of bazel's features like hermetic builds. Most larger C and C++ don't use bazel to build and don't have BUILD files, so you end up maintaining your own build system for that project OR use something like [this][1].
1: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc
In An ex-Googler’s guide to dev toolsI don't know much about it, because I believe dependency on installed in system libraries lead to non-reproducible builds (each machine is configured differently).
Quick googling shows there is a lot of external rules for pkg-config https://github.com/cherrry/bazel_pkg_config or rules for building third-parties with cmake https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc for example.
In From QMake to CMake: A story on why CMake is pretty nice in 2020It does, via https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc, but it's not always the best idea.
In Allowing CMake functions to return(value)I'd say the main the challenge that both Bazel and Buck have to face in the C++ land is that it's still too much work to migrate an existing cmake/autotools project to them. One nice project that tries to tackle that is https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc. But yes, there are minor things that make migration from Bazel to Buck or vice versa not as smooth as it could be, and I'm confident those will be fixed.
To me the biggest added value of Bazel is the remote (build and test) execution (which will get a nice performance boost from https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/6862 in Bazel 0.25; also mentioned in [3]).
(Your [3] doesn't compare Bazel and Buck, only Bazel with remote caching and without it, so it's not clear from it that Buck leverages caches better than Bazel).
And one nit, Bazel doesn't allow you to download anyt
Read the rest
hing in the loading, analysis, or execution phases ("the BUILD files"), those are completely hermetic, sandboxed, and reproducible (when compilers are). The package manager integrations happen when resolving external repositories ("the WORKSPACE file"), where non-hermetic behavior is allowed and is used e.g. to autoconfigure C++ toolchain, or download npm packages.
Bazel integrates well with nixpkgs and npm with rules_nixpkgs [0] and rules_nodejs [1] respectively.
Tangentially related to package manager integration: Bazel can now build with CMake in-tree [2].
[0] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nixpkgs/
[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/
[2] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc/
In Tensorflow 2.0: models migration and new design