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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity? There used to be a number of really popular and widely used projects such as closure compiler, gwt/j2cl, guava and other Java libs, and supposedly lots of golang stuff (not to speak of k8s where people seem to be satisfied it's a black box) that are dying behind bazel walls.

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> Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity?

Yes. For instance, Stripe uses Bazel internally for ~all of its builds. https://stripe.com/blog/fast-secure-builds-choose-two

For other users, you might peruse the Bazelcon 2025 schedule, which happened earlier this month: https://bazelcon2025.sched.com/

“dying behind bazel walls” is a bit dramatic when it’s a freely available tool that anyone can learn and use.

imo, it’s also among the very few options that try to solve the hard problems of build systems (alongside Buck and maybe Nix).

Open source projects? Maybe less so.

But there are definitely companies that use Bazel in a major way.

I lost a month to Bazel a few years ago. The documentation had so many holes and what was there was either out of date or wildly inaccurate. You could not produce an Angular build using the tutorials as written. Everything was wrong. I'm sure Bazel great if you have a team of people to write bespoke libraries on top of it for each of your targets. I ended up using turbo for frontend and uv workspaces on the backend.

The Swiss company I work at (~300 employees) maintains a monorepo with projects in multiple languages that is managed with Bazel.

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