I am a big fan of Anki, and for reasons I wanted to build it on a machine I have on an uncommon architecture (it has a graphical desktop). I have all of the components... rust, typescript, qtwebengine, etc) installed and working. I invested some time in trying to convince bazel that the required dependencies existed, to no avail. Rules broke left right and centre and every time I found the solution, other things broke. I think it insisted on pulling stuff from the internet, including definitions of other stuff I needed to change. I can't remember much more than that, as I gave up and haven't thought about it much since.

Thing is, pkg-config would've picked up the dependencies just fine - they were literally all there. I even built Rust from source on my weird machine with musl variant, before realising musl has some issues on my architecture.

I suspect Bazel may work well inside of Google for infra/server side stuff (never worked there). I'm a lot more skeptical of more complex builds, like desktop applications across various platforms. Chrome still uses "gn" to generate ninja files, and then ninja to build. For my own stuff, I won't touch it.

I probably wouldn't have commented, except that, to my surprise it seems the Anki developers have also decided life is too short https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4...