April 2022 Summaries

BuildBuddy is a UI, distributed cache, and remote execution platform for Bazel builds that helps securely compile code, cache artifacts, and visualize results. One of the challenges it faces is scheduling remote executions, which involves matching actions received by its API to remote workers. In the early days, BuildBuddy used a load balancer, but this resulted in uneven task distribution and longer build times. The company then implemented Sparrow, a distributed scheduling algorithm that uses the power of two choices and late-binding to improve maximum load and resilience. This solution has been successful for BuildBuddy and is still used in production today.

rules_xcodeproj is a new Bazel ruleset that enables the generation of Xcode projects from targets in your workspace. The first version, 0.1.0, has been released with the aim to fully support all of Xcode's features and provide additional benefits such as indexing, debugging, inline warnings and errors, tests, SwiftUI Previews, and more. rules_xcodeproj supports building with both Xcode and Bazel while maintaining compatibility with other existing tools like rules_apple/rules_swift. The team has been working on this project for two months and plans to cover all requirements in future updates.