In my experience, Bazel is great if you are a Google-sized company that can afford to have an entire team of at least 5-10 engineers doing nothing but working on your build system full time.
But I've watched it be insanely detrimental to the productivity of smaller companies and teams who don't understand the mountain of incidental complexity they're signing up for when adopting it. It's usually because a startup hires an ex-Googler who raves about how great Blaze is without understanding how much effort is spent internally to make it great.
Thanks for the discussion. What was the timeframe of your work in these Bazel codebases (or maybe it's ongoing)? And were they embedded systems or something else?
But I've watched it be insanely detrimental to the productivity of smaller companies and teams who don't understand the mountain of incidental complexity they're signing up for when adopting it. It's usually because a startup hires an ex-Googler who raves about how great Blaze is without understanding how much effort is spent internally to make it great.