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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, 12:45:45 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 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

5 sources
jart·Dec 21, 2021
I used to do a lot of work on Bazel. I wrote its downloader code for example. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/ed7ced0018dc5c5eb... Bazel is nice, but these days I'm running a small scrappy operation, so I just use GNU Make. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/7064d736e3ded15087... I like Make since it's able to build a repository with 17k .o files, 80 .a archives, and 661 .com executables from scratch in under a minute on one personal computer (if the kernel page cache is warm). I wrote a couple small helper commands to make the make config more manageable, like package.com, mkdeps.com, compile.com, ar.com, zipobj.com, and runit.com. The reason why Make works for me, is because I think the root cause of needing things like Autoconf and Cmake is because most projects need to depend on seven different C libraries. I decided
Read the rest
that, rather than focusing on writing a better build config, I'd rather use an unfancy build system and instead devote my energy towards having a single C library that runs on all seven of the platforms I'm targeting. I owe a lot of thanks to projects like musl, dlmalloc, dtoa, llvm, etc. from whom I borrowed source code. That enabled me to abstract portability at the libc level, rather than punting to #ifdefs and configs.
In Show HN: Lisp with GC in 436 Bytes
jart·May 17, 2021
Author here. Believe it or not, I'm also the author of some of Blaze's coolest features, like its downloader, which reduced TensorFlow build flakes down from 10% to 0%. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/92887a08a55be96ec... The Cosmopolitan Makefile already has Blaze-like tooling. For example, it does strict dependency checking to verify the DEPS list for each static archive specifies all of its directly-reachable dependencies. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/b8f38cf55d84bac7d7... See example build config here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/b8f38cf55d84bac7d7... That was actually one of the first features I wrote for the Cosmopolitan codebase, because it has ~67 static archive .a files, and making sure those all get linked in the correct order and are acyclic would have been nearly impossible without such a
Read the rest
tool. I'm sure in the future people will want a more Pythonic build syntax, since with GNU Make it's a bit easy to shoot oneself in the foot. The biggest issue contributors have had so far with the build is that we need to specify in the top-level Makefile a correctly topologically-ordered list of `include foo.mk` lines. Otherwise some pretty counterintuitive errors happen. But one grows used to it after a little pain and the repo feels like second nature. Ultimately, I just really didn't want to invent yet another build system. I'm pretty proud of the fact that (at least for now) I've managed to make GNU Make work so well for such a large repo. Google themselves actually used GNU Make for their codebase until around ~2005 so I'm hoping Cosmopolitan has got at least another decade of use in it.
In Cosmopolitan Libc 1.0

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