August 2024 Summaries

Remote Build Execution (RBE) is a technique aimed at speeding up development by offloading computation tasks from the local machine to a network of worker machines, which can be particularly beneficial for large codebases with extensive build and test graphs. Aspect has integrated RBE into its Workflows platform on both GCP and AWS, leveraging open-source tools like Buildbarn for execution and cache management to enhance performance and scalability. While RBE can significantly reduce build times for complex projects, Aspect argues that it should be considered a last resort due to potentially high costs and complexity, with a preference for "Minimal Execution" strategies that maximize cache efficiency. Aspect's RBE is tailored for large organizations like Airtable, where parallelism and remote execution provide substantial benefits, but for smaller codebases or teams, local execution might be more cost-effective. The company emphasizes the importance of a well-configured Bazel environment and offers trials to help teams assess the potential advantages of RBE in optimizing their workflow.

Aspect has announced the release of version 2.0 of its JavaScript ruleset for Bazel, known as rules_js, which offers various improvements and new features. The update includes support for pnpm version 9 and the onlyBuiltDependencies option for enhanced security, allowing direct linking of js_library targets to consuming packages, improving speed and compatibility. The release also introduces rules_lint, which facilitates the integration of ESLint, and optimizes Docker image layers for efficiency. Performance enhancements in the update include faster Bazel analysis phases and more efficient npm_translate_lock operations. Aspect encourages users to upgrade by providing a comprehensive migration guide and offers a free trial of its Aspect Workflows platform to compare with existing setups. Feedback is welcomed to further refine the migration process, and users are invited to support the project through sponsorship or testimonials.

The post explores the author's experimentation with documenting API docs for Bazel rules using the Starlark language, highlighting frustrations with the traditional tool Stardoc due to its reliance on outdated dependencies and cumbersome installation processes. The author discusses the challenges faced with Stardoc, such as its requirement for building Go code, dependency on a C++ compiler, and its complex integration with Maven. With the release of Bazel 7, a new approach using the built-in starlark_doc_extract rule is explored, which allows for extracting documentation without the need for Stardoc, and leverages the Buf Schema Registry to simplify parsing protocol buffers. The author demonstrates converting extracted docstrings into readable Markdown using Handlebars, a lightweight template engine, and also outlines how this process can be integrated into Bazel's BUILD files for ease of use. This experimentation serves as a potential alternative to Stardoc, providing insights into modernizing the documentation workflow for Bazel rules while also offering a link to the working code at the end for further exploration.