I think open-source projects avoid Bazel not because of the Java issue. You can install it pretty easily and never realize that it's written in Java.
By analogy, I'd say that if Make is a hammer, Bazel is a CNC machine. Most DIYers are going to have hammers, and everyone understands how to use them, but CNC machines are becoming cheaper and more common.
The official .deb is 156MB compressed, which is prohibitive for all but the largest OSS projects. I assume much of that is the bundled JRE, but that only illustrates the point about Java.
Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
> If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Chromium's gn started being prototyped in 2013 [1].
Android's soong started being developed in June 2015 [2].
Bazel's first open source release was in September 2015 [3].
In addition, you surely can't be serious about Google not 'dogfooding Blaze' - it's a critical build system internally at Google. And new external projects (like gVisor) are also now built using Bazel.
> The official .deb is 156MB compressed, which is prohibitive for all but the largest OSS projects.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement. Why is 156MB prohibitive? You don't need to include Bazel in the project any more than you need to include Xcode for the macOS version of a project. You can specify a version of Bazel with .bazelversion so you don't need to worry so much about people using the wrong Bazel.
There are some systems like Waf and Autotools where the build system is customarily bundled inside the source release, but this is not universal--if you use CMake, it's almost certainly not bundled either.
> Most tellingly, Google has gone through two major build system migrations (Android and Chrome), and neither project chose to migrate to Bazel/Blaze. If Google won't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't inspire much confidence.
Android is a fairly large project itself consisting of the Kernel (which has got its own custom build system) and a ton of different components. From what I understand, for NDK projects, Bazel is moving towards "the one sane way to do things", it will just take time, this stuff doesn't happen overnight. For non-NDK (pure Java or Kotlin) projects, there's not really a point.
Chromium is a bit of a special snowflake and predates Bazel's Windows support, and a codebase the size of Chromium would take a long time to migrate--but it looks like it's heading in that direction. From what I can see in the revisions to the Chromium build system, it seems that it's massive custom build system is moving towards Bazel by leaps and bounds. It's already structured like a Bazel project and uses much of the same terminology, I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred Bazel scripts appear overnight in Chrome, because it looks like much of the groundwork has been done.
Most open-sourced Google projects use Bazel now. Of course, projects like Android and Chrome have been around for a long time and have invested in their build systems, so any change will take years.
Android and Chrome also both use git for version control. Take that how you will, but I don't think it's an indictment of Piper (https://research.google/pubs/pub45424/)
By analogy, I'd say that if Make is a hammer, Bazel is a CNC machine. Most DIYers are going to have hammers, and everyone understands how to use them, but CNC machines are becoming cheaper and more common.