We're excited to announce the Beta release of Bazel, an open source build system designed to support a wide variety of different programming languages and platforms.
There are lots of other build systems out there -- Maven, Gradle, Ant, Make, and CMake just to name a few. So what’s special about Bazel? Bazel is what we use to build the large majority of software within Google. As such, it has been designed to handle build problems specific to Google’s development environment, including a massive, shared code repository in which all software is built from source, a heavy emphasis on automated testing and release processes, and language and platform diversity. Bazel isn’t right for every use case, but we believe that we’re not the only ones facing these kinds of problems and we want to contribute what we’ve learned so far to the larger developer community.
Our Beta release provides:
- A robust API for adding your own build rules.
We still have a long way to go. Looking ahead towards our 1.0.0 release, we plan to provide Windows support, distributed caching, and Go support among other features. See our roadmap for more details and follow our blog or Twitter account for regular updates. Feel free to contact us with questions or feedback on the mailing list or IRC (#bazel on freenode).
By Jeff Cox, Bazel team
