January 2022 Summaries

Bazel 5.0 introduces several improvements aimed at making builds faster for BuildBuddy users. These include enhancements to the Build Event Service (BES) that make uploading events and artifacts more reliable and performant, deduplicated cache calls and uploads to reduce network traffic, faster action cache checking through caching of Merkle tree nodes, asynchronous cache uploading for improved local execution speed, and compressed uploads and downloads using the zstd algorithm. These changes should significantly improve build times for projects that share a lot of inputs between actions or rely heavily on BuildBuddy's Remote Cache or Remote Execution features.

The Bazel 5.0 release includes numerous improvements in performance, extensibility, and support for various programming languages. Some highlights include better support for Apple Silicon iOS simulator, improved worker cancellation, added persistent workers, enhanced Starlark language features, and more. This release also marks the beginning of a new era for Bazel with its transition to rolling releases.