Use of bazelisp: google vs. non-google project

[jeosol]

Hi Devs,

First of all, I have never used bazelisp.

Second, I am trying to use this tool to build a large CL/SBCL and would want to speed things up. I am reading through the README to understand the tool. I have a few questions:

1. Can bazelisp be used for outside projects and not just google projects
2. Coming from using quicklisp/ASDF, are there differences with bazelisp. Is there a simple test/tutorial that shows how one may structure things to use bazelisp given that most CL developers seem to use the quicklisp/ASDF.
3. My interest is in speeding up build times so I am looking into bazelisp for testing, in addition to trying to updated Fare's POIU (in ASDF) to work with recent SBCL versions, i.e., get it to do parallel builds.

Thanks

[svetlyak40wt]

I've tried to run bazel build //... inside a cloned repository and have got this error:

ERROR: /Users/art/projects/lisp/bazelisp/rule-tests/BUILD:221:24: no such target '@bazel_skylib//:additional_dynamic_load_outputs': target 'additional_dynamic_load_outputs' not declared in package '' defined by /private/var/tmp/_bazel_art/184bb0c53499abd3d40475947a2fb54d/external/bazel_skylib/BUILD
ERROR: Analysis of target '//rule-tests:test-lisp-deps-test' failed; build aborted:
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.105s
INFO: 0 processes.
FAILED: Build did NOT complete successfully (0 packages loaded, 0 targets configured)

@jeosol was you able to solve this problem?

[jeosol]

@svetlyak40wt

Hi Alex,

It is interesting you also tried bazelisp. To answer your question quickly, I didn't get it to work - yet.

I will provide some background below and a summary of the response from Google guys when I contacted them.

The main problem I have was a lack of documentation especially for using outside projects. So I had to search on the web and finally emailing some guys in the qitab team. I was informed that their priority is on Google internal projects which is fair. I wanted to understand how to even set things up. Also the Google version that worked for them with the github code was a bit older (I guess for stability).

There is a challenge on where to even start for someone trying to use bazelisp. At the time, I didn't even know you also had to have bazel proper (the main engine) also installed. I did try to create a bazelisp fork and use for more recent SBCL version (only CL implementation I use for my project). There were many changes I had to do at the time but stopped to use plain ql and ASDF.

Another challenge I saw (after searching on the web and discussing with Fare) is that you need big machines to get things to work very well and see benefits. I was able to use bazel proper to test C++ files and they have tutorials for that on the main website but I could not get bazelisp to work. I do plan to look at it again sometime later.

Another challenge I remember is that you need to handcraft the rules files as the Google guys told me (at least at the time) they are interested in a tool that can automatically build those rule files from asdf system definitions. My code base is large, so I can't build those rules by hand and only an automatic tool will enable me try bazelisp out. Another alternative is to write rules for a smaller subsystem just to see how bazelisp works.

Another option is Fare's PIOU but it also needs some work to get it to work with recent versions (at least when I tried it). There are some criticisms of the tool, one of which is its use of fork to do the parallel builds. I also haven't gotten this to work but I did hack a local PIOU version for some time, again to come back to it later.

Apologies for the long winded response, I just wanted to provide some background and context.