Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java?
Tools like Bazel or Nix or <whatever you enjoy> are incredible for many reasons but they are, to a first approximation, very, very high-effort and complex tools that require care. It's like a racing car. You need an engineer on hand to keep the car running, and someone to drive it too. Maybe you're both of those people, but only a driver isn't enough.
They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) So to make it a slam dunk, you have to make a pretty clear case that it's not "just" 2x better, but actually 10x better. And it's actually even harder than that: it can't just be 10x better in practice, it has to appear 10x better at a glance. Like, at the window shopping phase, it needs to catch their eye. That's difficult to nail and basically impossible to do perfectly.
Personally? I'm all-in on "whole sale" build tools like this that hit many nails with one hammer. They solve a tremendous amount of issues. But they aren't always good and I can really see why they can fail to gain traction for many teams: they simply aren't necessary for them, even if they're really a lot better in many ways. I get it.
> Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java?
Exactly that - for one it was a plugin for Alfresco ECM that disobeyed every Alfresco SDK rule :), then a custom Angular frontend that needs to be build according to the plugin - furthermore the business was of that kind that every customer had a specialized build with customization - Bazel would have solved that in a very neat way - including overriding a few source files for a specific customer.
We tried to build then docker images with maven which was just a shitshow considering our problems - however I'm not there anymore but I'd like to have the exact setup that you describe - the big hammer to don't have to deal with all the stupid things - especially as my background is sysadmin and every problem I don't have to solve anymore is good for me :)
I find it interesting that Bazel and Nix don't seem to complement each other as much as I'd think given that they're both 'high effort, high reward tools which deal with hermetic building'.
They certainly both suffer from issues related to upstream packages doing their own thing.
> They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) ...
I use Nix. I haven't use Bazel.
I think Nix is wonderful for enthusiasts. It takes some time to learn. However, Nix is excellent at dealing with packages. And developers often do things which involve packages. -- e.g. Nix is good for declaring a shell with programs that can be made available.
> They certainly both suffer from issues related to upstream packages doing their own thing.
Having used both Bazel and Nix, I agree they suffer here but with a slightly different take: They suffer because they must reinvent the wheel and provide a new API to mimic the upstream package managers. They're in a constant race to keep pace with best practices outside of their community - and patch their APIs accordingly which become "dirty mirrors", only partially reflecting the intent and functionality of upstream tooling.
But that's kind of the point - they apparently need to take over and constrain the system to fully understand the dependency tree.
I wish there was a Bazel/Nix/Guix build tool that had some barrier between the dependency tree and the developer tools that one uses daily. When I'm building the system as a whole, I don't want to think about cargo vs npm. But when I'm writing code for a given component, the native tooling is the correct abstraction. Is it even theoretically possible to resolve those two ideas without introducing another glue language?
Bazel is definitely worth it if you have a large enough repo. But if you have such a large repo you can and should have a team that's dedicated to CI, builds, etc.
If you have a small team and repo it's probably not worth the effort.
Tools like Bazel or Nix or <whatever you enjoy> are incredible for many reasons but they are, to a first approximation, very, very high-effort and complex tools that require care. It's like a racing car. You need an engineer on hand to keep the car running, and someone to drive it too. Maybe you're both of those people, but only a driver isn't enough.
They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) So to make it a slam dunk, you have to make a pretty clear case that it's not "just" 2x better, but actually 10x better. And it's actually even harder than that: it can't just be 10x better in practice, it has to appear 10x better at a glance. Like, at the window shopping phase, it needs to catch their eye. That's difficult to nail and basically impossible to do perfectly.
Personally? I'm all-in on "whole sale" build tools like this that hit many nails with one hammer. They solve a tremendous amount of issues. But they aren't always good and I can really see why they can fail to gain traction for many teams: they simply aren't necessary for them, even if they're really a lot better in many ways. I get it.