CMake vs Bazel In Practise - Real Code, Real Results

Is Bazel a good alternative to CMake, or any of the other C/C++ build systems? My answer so far has been "don't know because I've never tried Bazel." Today, I'm going to change that, and put Bazel head-to-head against CMake.

Watch this video to find out what happened, and then make up your own mind on which one to use.

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At Kea Sigma Delta we enjoy creating awesome stuff using software & electronics, and helping others to do the same.

[bowandarrow-]

Thanks, looking forward to the followup in 10 years.

[knrkk]

Gonna stick with the default of cmake as well. Perhaps i didn’t find it but have u testet package managers for c++ like conan? If so whats ur take on that?

[vvyogi]

Similar experience, tried to use Bazel with a third-party library. Even after spending a significant amount of time, I couldn't make things work (tried the workspace and bazelmod both) and had to switch back to CMake (glad).

[default]

I know that CMake is not perfect, but I always find it better than other alternatives.

[llothar]

Had to write my own which uses make on Linux and generates manuals, gradle, Xcode on other platforms. Cmake sucks when you use other languages and crossplatform now means kotlin /swift/ c# and c++. It is now almost 40k ruby code. And thinks still missing, good luck for trying to do NDK C++ android unit testing

[SnowmEVE]

Great video! Please review the zig build system.

[marcotroster]

Idk man. All new low-level languages like Go, Rust, Zig have proper build systems and package managers built-in. I'd consider switching to those languages if possible, tbh.

[antoineleresche]

Do you plan to compare cmake to xmake?

[liautraver]

wanted to switch to bazel today, but just find it as horrible as cmake 😂 especially comes to dll and libs... swiching back today..

[boredstudent]

I think they coud (and should) migrate to winget rather than choco but windows installers with dependenciey and dev tooling is just so horrible. I'd blame that installation on windows not bazel.
The version management of basikils is an optinion, but with nvm, fvm, cargo, dotnet cli, python environments they appear to be current industry standard (and not without reason).

The documentation is on them ofc.

[toby]

This is yet another reason why I will not switch to Linux. MS Visual Studio blows CMake into the weads. No CMake, no make files required. Thats how it should be in 2024. Life is too short. So, as long as Linux lacks a decent C++ IDE, no thanks Linux. Bazel looks no better than the other second rate options. Even VSCode is pretty lame for serious work.