Hey Steve! Long-time follower of yours here (I used to read Stevey's Blog Rants back in the day) and I just wanted to say I really enjoy the show! Your posts were instrumental in getting me into Emacs back in the day; your posts about favourite programming books and compilers also had a huge impact on me. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for all the cool stuff you've put out over the years
It's not a coincidence that Bazel has a similar "feel" as Make. Bazel's BUILD files predate Bazel. There was an earlier tool, Make-makefile, that would look over a directory tree of BUILD files and generate a giant Makefile from them. Google kept writing more code and eventually the giant-generated Makefile was getting out of hand, took a long time for Make to parse each time. This was one of the main reasons for creating Bazel. Anyhow, BUILD file data looks a lot like Makefile info because historically one was transformed into the other.
How does Bazel compare to Nix? Seems like they both address the problem of hermetic, reproducible builds. Would be really interesting to see an example of running a complex integration test locally and how that compares to say a docker-compose based setup.
Bazel is really the best build system. The only thing stopping me from using it in my projects is the lack of proper integration support with visual studio. with xcode it's a bit better (there's a semi-official plugin), but for vs there's basically nothing except for a third-party plugin that hasn't seen any updates in 3 years. As for gradle, well, every time i try to open a slightly old project in android studio, it inevitably fails to build and most of the time it's something gradle-related, so I don't really have anything kind to say about it :-)
Hey Steve! Long-time follower of yours here (I used to read Stevey's Blog Rants back in the day) and I just wanted to say I really enjoy the show! Your posts were instrumental in getting me into Emacs back in the day; your posts about favourite programming books and compilers also had a huge impact on me. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for all the cool stuff you've put out over the years
Stevey are you doing Ok? No episodes in a while..
It's not a coincidence that Bazel has a similar "feel" as Make. Bazel's BUILD files predate Bazel. There was an earlier tool, Make-makefile, that would look over a directory tree of BUILD files and generate a giant Makefile from them. Google kept writing more code and eventually the giant-generated Makefile was getting out of hand, took a long time for Make to parse each time. This was one of the main reasons for creating Bazel. Anyhow, BUILD file data looks a lot like Makefile info because historically one was transformed into the other.
Have we worked out a good way to interact with the Stevey's Tech Talks community yet? I know there was some discussion of Discourse a while ago
How does Bazel compare to Nix? Seems like they both address the problem of hermetic, reproducible builds. Would be really interesting to see an example of running a complex integration test locally and how that compares to say a docker-compose based setup.
Bazel is really the best build system. The only thing stopping me from using it in my projects is the lack of proper integration support with visual studio. with xcode it's a bit better (there's a semi-official plugin), but for vs there's basically nothing except for a third-party plugin that hasn't seen any updates in 3 years. As for gradle, well, every time i try to open a slightly old project in android studio, it inevitably fails to build and most of the time it's something gradle-related, so I don't really have anything kind to say about it :-)
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Hope Stevie checks out Nix , its looking promising
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