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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, 2:04:58 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

12 sources
colatkinson·Aug 7, 2022
> With regards to chroot, I stand corrected. I knew it was a tree of symlinks, but I thought it was also more than that because symlinks alone don't seem like a sandbox. Honestly, Cosmopolitan's system appears to be more of a sandbox than that. To be totally clear: the tree of symlinks thing is a fallback, used only when lacking platform support or when sandboxing is explicitly turned off [0]. On Linux, the normal sandboxing strategy is to use namespaces, like most container runtimes. On Mac it apparently uses sandbox-exec (some opaque Apple tool), as was mentioned above. Chroot, being both non-POSIX, requiring root access on many systems, and not providing the necessary facilities is not really a great fit -- which I assume is why it's not used. There was experimental Windows sandbox support at one point [1] based on how MS does it for B
Read the rest
uildXL (their own build tool for giant monorepos) [2]. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be maintained, and under the hood it's kinda ugly -- it actively rewrites code in-memory to intercept calls to the Win32 APIs [3], which was apparently the cleanest/best way MS could come up with. However, from Bazel's POV it works in a roughly similar way -- you spawn subprocesses under a supervisor, which is in charge of spinning up whatever the target process is with restrictions on time/memory usage/file access. On the "sandbox in the interpreter" thing: what kind of checks are you envisioning? It seems like putting checks at that level would end up leaving a lot out -- the goal of any build system is to eventually spawn an arbitrary process (Python, gcc, javac, some shell script, etc.) and so even with extensive checks in starlark you'd end up with accidental sandbox breaks all over the place. For pure starlark rules you could e.g. check that there are no inputs from /usr, but even then if gcc does it implicitly, you're SOL. Or am I thinking of the wrong kind of checks? EDIT: somehow missed your sibling comment. Nix is definitely cool, and is pretty similar to how Bazel does things with regards to explicit build graphs. The check for "well-known commands" would also be cool IMO. That said, Nix also has a chroot-y sandbox-y thing it uses to spawn processes -- so they're not all that different [4]. [0] https://bazel.build/docs/sandboxing#sandboxing-strategies [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5136#issuecomment... [2] https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL/blob/master/Documentati... [3] https://github.com/microsoft/Detours/wiki [4] https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_package_manager#Sandboxing
In Using Landlock to Sandbox GNU Make
jart·Aug 5, 2022
Cosmopolitan Libc Makefile fixes this. And it does it with plain ordinary GNU Make. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/Makefile It even has Landlock LSM based sandboxing for strict dependency checking. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/ab301401c71effb0a0... It's faster too. Also GNU Make is what Google used for their mono repo before they switched to Blaze. They basically cited the reason they switched to Blaze as being because they didn't have Landlock. So now that we do, Make is the obvious choice! Disclaimer: Google used to pay me to write the coolest features in Bazel like its system for downloading files. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/ed7ced0018dc5c5eb... But I stopped supporting Bazel because they kept breaking git bisect history permantently with backwards incompatible changes.
In Keeping a project bisectable
jmillikin·Jul 4, 2022
The macOS sandbox isn't "deprecated", but it's treated as an internal detail of the OS subject to change without warning. Maybe the message is intended to warn people away from using the "sandbox-exec" tool? Periodically some third-party software will inadvisedly try to use sandbox-exec and encounter problems when the policy changes. Some examples I've run into with Bazel: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/10068 https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/13766
In macOS: App sandboxing via sandbox-exec (2020)
lolpython·Jun 23, 2022
I migrated a mid-size polyglot project from Makefiles to Bazel and C++ was a large component of the project. Some obstacles: 1. Building with QT5 MOC & UI files. There is a great library[0] for it but it has hardcoded paths to the QT binaries and header files assuming a system-wide installation. I had to patch the rule to point to our QT location. Then it worked fine. 2. There is no rule to build a fully static library[1]. Since we were shipping a static library to clients via our Makefile system, that was somewhat annoying. 3. We were using system links like `$PROJECT_ROOT/links/GCC/vX.Y.Z/ -> /opt/gcc/...` to point to all the build tools, but these didn't work in Bazel I think because it required absolute paths for any binaries it calls. We ended up putting them in a .bazelrc but we would need a different one for Windows and Linux. 4. N
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ot good integration with IDEs 5. (edit) The Bazel toolchain system is confusing and I couldn't understand it after reading all its docs Ultimately we did not keep using Bazel because we were building Python binaries and py_binary was too slow on Windows. And we didn't have enough time to write a PyInstaller rule. [0]: https://github.com/justbuchanan/bazel_rules_qt [1]: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/1920
In Incremental Builds for Haskell with Bazel
SaveTheRbtz·Apr 28, 2022
I did PoC experiments with compression, chunking, and IPFS here: https://github.com/SaveTheRbtz/bazel-cache If you need a mature compression implementation for bazel I would recommend using recent bazel versions w/ gRPC-based bazel-remote: https://github.com/buchgr/bazel-remote bazel nowadays supports end-to-end compression w/ `--experimental_remote_cache_compression`: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/pull/14041
In Casync – A Content-Addressable Data Synchronization Tool
jart·Apr 5, 2022
I wrote Bazel's system for downloading files. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/ed7ced0018dc5c5eb... So I'm sympathetic to your point of view. However some of us feel like people should stop reinventing Make and instead make Make better. That's what I'm doing. I'm adding ptrace() support. That's something I asked the Bazel folks to do for years but they felt it was a more important priority to have Bazel be a system for running other build systems like Make, embedded inside Bazel. So I asked myself, why don't we just use Make? It's what Google used to use for its mono repo for like ten years.
In The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter

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