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Comment by keddad | Hacker News Reader

You basically have to declare all those dependencies in Bazel. For instance, if you look at rules for Go, they declare the whole dependency graph (Modules, their relations) in Bazel. There is tooling to generate that for you, so it's not really that bad.

Where it gets harder is when this language feature is integrated with an existing build system. C# is normally build with it's own build system, and to build it with Bazel you have to essentially rewrite some of it's logic in Bazel, which can be hard, but doable.

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Have you got any more information on how to use Bazel with C#?

There are open-source rules for that, but at my place of work, we found those lacking. We had to write our own set of rules which would basically take all the source files for a given target, generate MSbuild files depending on the target type and call it from Bazel to build the code in this isolated environment. Another problem are nugets: you have to wrap each in a Bazel target in order to make it available during build, and analyze them beforehand to understand what kind of outputs (like .dlls) will they generate during build. It's a bit of a mess, sadly.

That's what I feared. Have you got any solution to make this play nicely with Visual Studio?

You will need to maintain MS Build files alongside the Bazel definitions. In theory the MS Build files can be generated from the Bazel definitions but someone has to write that tool.

> There is tooling to generate that for you, so it's not really that bad.

So you need several layers of tooling just to get something built.

It's bad

I may be missing something, but it’s quite similar to pkgconfig+(cmake|autoconf). If you include a header, your build system probably needs to know where on the filesystem that header exists.

If you only ever need to build Rust code then cargo is all you should need. However if you need to build Rust, C, C++, python, and JavaScript all together in one build then Cargo is inevitably going to make you sad. That is when you reach for something like Bazel.

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