What is Bazel – Tutorial, Examples, and Advantages

Bazel is an open-source build tool created by Google to streamline the build processes for large-scale software projects, offering advantages such as reproducibility, scalability, and integration with modern platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. Unlike other build tools that are often framework-specific, Bazel is designed to handle multi-language dependencies, making it ideal for projects with diverse components like Rust, Go, Flutter, and Angular. Its ability to hook into CI/CD pipelines enhances productivity by allowing more reliable and regular software testing and release. Bazel's features include hermetic and idempotent builds, which ensure consistent outputs from the same set of inputs, and support for incremental and parallel builds, which optimize resource usage and speed up the process. Originating from Google's internal tool Blaze, Bazel is suitable for projects with massive codebases and is embraced by companies like Dropbox and Uber to scale their CI/CD pipelines. Written in the high-level Starlark language, Bazel simplifies writing build configurations and abstracts complexities like compilers and linkers, while its caching mechanism and parallel execution capabilities ensure high performance. Bazel's growing open-source community reflects its increasing traction, as evidenced by its GitHub presence and active discourse on platforms like Stack Overflow.