{"slug": "bazel", "name": "Bazel", "category": "dev-libs", "category_name": "Libraries and frameworks", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 7, "warners": 1, "score": 2.76, "rising": 1.67, "first": "2025-12-23", "latest": "2026-10-27", "why": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci", "official_url": "https://bazel.build", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Bazel"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 804274160, "item_id": 50267135, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267135", "by": "pcj-github", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions.", "excerpt": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions. Queue the bazel-haters on HN... The rust support has gotten really good, and the maintainer for the rust rules works at OpenAI, which, incidentally, is how at least parts of OpenAI builds rust and wasm: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/MODULE.bazel. I have a pretty complex rust backend in my project. I rent a capable bare-metal build server ", "context": "", "use_case": "building and releasing Rust backend", "switched_from": "Cargo", "story": "One year of Dioxus fullstack in production: the good, the painful"}, {"id": 796680336, "item_id": 49792521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792521", "by": "mraza007", "date": "2026-09-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been using Bazel to improve our build times", "excerpt": "Agentic Coding has been a huge strain on CI, I have been using Bazel to improve our build times and ultimately building customized runners to improve our CI Anyways great blog post from linear team a lot to learn from it", "context": "", "use_case": "improving build and CI times", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"}, {"id": 766072001, "item_id": 47879500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879500", "by": "klodolph", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Some of the more principled approaches are tools like Nix", "excerpt": "There have got to be a million ways to do this by now. Some of the more principled approaches are tools like Nix (https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/nix-docker-build/) and Bazel (https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci). But if you want to use an existing package manager like apt, you can pick it apart. Apt calls dpkg, and dpkg extracts files and runs post-install scripts. Only the post-install script needs to run insi", "context": "", "use_case": "reproducible container builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 765659185, "item_id": 47853699, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47853699", "by": "frontenderdude", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I even had the unfortunate stint on working on configuring Bazel to a frontend monorepo.", "excerpt": "I am a primarily frontend learning fullstack guy. I've been working in this space for about 10 years. I used jQuery, Angular, Angular 2, React. I did JavaScript then TypeScript. I configured freakin Gulp, Grunt, Brunch, Webpack 1 to 5, and now Vite, idk maybe in the future Eggpancake or something. I even had the unfortunate stint on working on configuring Bazel to a frontend monorepo. So I get it, I get the pain. As ", "context": "frontend developer for about 10 years", "use_case": "frontend monorepo", "switched_from": "", "story": "Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental?"}]}], "who": [{"by": "seanmcdirmid", "context": "not much of a Python programmer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372204", "date": "2025-12-23"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["building and releasing rust backend", "improving build and ci times", "building with musl", "reproducible container builds", "frontend monorepo", "build system"], "compared": [{"slug": "cargo", "name": "Cargo", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "nix", "name": "Nix", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265960", "title": "One year of Dioxus fullstack in production: the good, the painful", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792067", "title": "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49133889", "title": "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47871519", "title": "Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824051", "title": "Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155597", "title": "Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804274160, "item_id": 50267135, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267135", "by": "pcj-github", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions.", "excerpt": "Your LLM can replace your cargo build with bazel in a few sessions. Queue the bazel-haters on HN... The rust support has gotten really good, and the maintainer for the rust rules works at OpenAI, which, incidentally, is how at least parts of OpenAI builds rust and wasm: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/MODULE.bazel. I have a pretty complex rust backend in my project. I rent a capable bare-metal build server ", "context": "", "use_case": "building and releasing Rust backend", "switched_from": "Cargo", "story": "One year of Dioxus fullstack in production: the good, the painful"}, {"id": 796680336, "item_id": 49792521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792521", "by": "mraza007", "date": "2026-09-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been using Bazel to improve our build times", "excerpt": "Agentic Coding has been a huge strain on CI, I have been using Bazel to improve our build times and ultimately building customized runners to improve our CI Anyways great blog post from linear team a lot to learn from it", "context": "", "use_case": "improving build and CI times", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"}, {"id": 786221200, "item_id": 49138825, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138825", "by": "Orphis", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the tooling I used (Bazel) did that automatically", "excerpt": "Last time I checked (a while ago), it wasn't. You needed to compile musl and exclude a few files from the archive to then provide your own allocator. Depending on the toolchain, I'm assuming you could use some tricks or hacks to make it work better, but the tooling I used (Bazel) did that automatically and I haven't bothered to look at the internals yet .", "context": "", "use_case": "building with musl", "switched_from": "", "story": "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"}, {"id": 766072001, "item_id": 47879500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879500", "by": "klodolph", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Some of the more principled approaches are tools like Nix", "excerpt": "There have got to be a million ways to do this by now. Some of the more principled approaches are tools like Nix (https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/nix-docker-build/) and Bazel (https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci). But if you want to use an existing package manager like apt, you can pick it apart. Apt calls dpkg, and dpkg extracts files and runs post-install scripts. Only the post-install script needs to run insi", "context": "", "use_case": "reproducible container builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image"}, {"id": 765659185, "item_id": 47853699, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47853699", "by": "frontenderdude", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I even had the unfortunate stint on working on configuring Bazel to a frontend monorepo.", "excerpt": "I am a primarily frontend learning fullstack guy. I've been working in this space for about 10 years. I used jQuery, Angular, Angular 2, React. I did JavaScript then TypeScript. I configured freakin Gulp, Grunt, Brunch, Webpack 1 to 5, and now Vite, idk maybe in the future Eggpancake or something. I even had the unfortunate stint on working on configuring Bazel to a frontend monorepo. So I get it, I get the pain. As ", "context": "frontend developer for about 10 years", "use_case": "frontend monorepo", "switched_from": "", "story": "Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental?"}, {"id": 754498273, "item_id": 47156142, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156142", "by": "sluongng", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Oh this is really neat for the Bazel community", "excerpt": "Oh this is really neat for the Bazel community, as depending on tree-sitter to build a gazelle language extension, with Gazelle written in Go, requires you to use CGO. Now perhaps we can get rid of the CGO dependency and make it pure Go instead. I have pinged some folks to take a look at it.", "context": "", "use_case": "build system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go"}, {"id": 741955264, "item_id": 46372204, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372204", "by": "seanmcdirmid", "date": "2025-12-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used AI to write some python code and some bazel rules", "excerpt": "I used AI to write some python code and some bazel rules to generate some python code around that to do some new workflow system I wanted to prototype. It just did it, it would make mistakes but since I had it running tests it would fix the code after running the tests. The big issue is that I didn\u2019t know the APIs very well, and I\u2019m not much of a Python programmer. I could have done this by hand in around 5 days with", "context": "not much of a Python programmer", "use_case": "build rules for workflow prototype", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Can Write Your Code. It Can't Do Your Job"}]}