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bazelbuild
bazel
Java2015–2026
bazelbuild / bazel

bazel

a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system

Developer ToolsTesting & Quality
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
77Distinct people
93Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
26.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

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

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:03:38 AM 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 year93 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-03-24 16:07:21 UTC to 2026-01-21 00:19:31 UTC.

0510152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 4 submissions, 8 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 1 submissions, 11 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1248
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12111
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

12 sources
twic·Oct 1, 2015
Definitely worth considering! I've never used Bazel, so can't give a very helpful answer. Two things discourage me. Firstly, it's still in beta - 0.1.0 is out [1], and there's plenty to do before 1.0. [2]. Secondly, according to the article on Bazel currently floating up on HN [3]: "Blaze was designed to work for Google's unified codebase and Bazel is no different. The implication of a unified source tree is that all dependencies for a given software component exist within the tree. This is just not true in the open source world where the vast majority of software packages have dependencies on other libraries or tools, which is a good thing. But I don't see how Bazel copes with this, if at all." How would i use Bazel to build a project which uses dependencies from Maven Central, or my company's internal repository? It seems that Bazel can
Read the rest
fetch jars from Maven repositories [4], but i don't think it does transitive dependencies. Also, the extension story looks a bit weird [4]: "Skylark is a superset of the core build language and its syntax is a subset of Python. The following constructs have been added to the core build language: if statements, for loops, and function definitions. It is designed to be simple, thread-safe and integrated with the BUILD language. It is not a general-purpose language and most Python features are not included." Whilst i'm no fan of Groovy, it's nice to be able to write plugins in a general-purpose language. For example, in one of the build scripts i linked to in my comment, i have a custom build step which processes templates by running another Java program (which was downloaded as a JAR from Maven), and in other builds i've written plugins which call directly into Java libraries (again, which were downloaded as JARs from Maven). Could i do that with Skylark? [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases [2] http://bazel.io/roadmap.html [3] http://julipedia.meroh.net/2015/04/on-bazel-and-open-source.... [4] http://bazel.io/docs/build-encyclopedia.html#maven_jar [5] http://bazel.io/docs/skylark/concepts.html
In Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app on the JVM today?
yonran·Mar 24, 2015
Conceptually, your build results should be a pure function of your source tree. If I understand correctly, within Google, the cross-compilers are actually checked in to the source tree, so that the distributed jobs will use the same compiler to build your code. It seems like currently bazel only uses whatever is in /usr/bin though[0]. For Java compilations, bazel additionally has its own jar builder that sorts the filenames and zeros the timestamps within the zip file[1]. [0]: https://github.com/google/bazel/tree/master/tools/cpp [1]: https://github.com/google/bazel/tree/master/src/java_tools/b...
In Bazel – Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone
spankalee·Mar 24, 2015
I don't think you're interpreting that section quite right. That section is talking about whether or not Bazel is fully _developed_ in the open, and the answer is "Unfortunately not". What they mean is that changes to the internal source of Blaze often involve changes to both the open sourced part, which is Bazel, and the closed parts, which are additional rules that are neither open sourced, nor included in Bazel (Blaze has about 5x as many rules as Bazel). It's best to make atomic changes, so rather than split the changes, review and submit the open source changes externally, and the closed rules changes internally (which would complicate reviews, testing, syncing and rollbacks), then pull in the external changes, they submit these cross-code-base changes internally, then dump the change into the external repo. The next paragraph on tha
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t page makes it clear that the code is open, even if not all of the development process is. To be clear, all of Bazel is open source and the source is available here: https://github.com/google/bazel
In Bazel – Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone
kchod·Mar 24, 2015
The Golang source code for the server code at google is built with this tool. The rules that accomplish this are rather complex due to their interactions with our C++ libraries, and predates the open source "Go" tool. The experience with the Google internal rules, motivated some of the choices in the "go" tool, I believe. If you're interested, hanwen wrote a bunch rules with similar semantics as the internal rules, see https://github.com/google/bazel/tree/master/base_workspace/e... . It would be nice to make these semantics match the external ones better, but it requires us to open up more tooling, so people won't need to write BUILD files.
In Bazel – Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone

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