Bazel 1.0 has been released with better integration on Windows via genrule support, as well as improvements to the handling of C++ and Java. Bazel is an open source tool that automates software building and testing.

The origins of Bazel are in Google, which uses the build tool Blaze internally. Google released an open-sourced part of the Blaze tool as Bazel, named as an anagram of Blaze. The developers describe Bazel as similar to Make, Maven, and Gradle, and as using a human-readable, high-level build language to describe the build properties of your project at a high semantical level. Bazel uses the concepts of libraries, binaries, scripts, and data sets to avoid the need for developers to write individual calls to tools such as compilers and linkers.

Bazel caches existing work and tracks changes to both file content and build commands to minimize rebuilds. It is multi-platform, and can build binaries and deployable packages for multiple platforms, including desktop, server, and mobile, from the same project.

This 1.0 release is the first of Bazel's move to a semantic versioning in the naming, and the developers say users can rely on at least three-month stability windows between major releases that contain backward incompatibility features.

In practical terms, the Windows support in this release has been improved with the genrule now supporting cmd_bash, cmd_ps, and cmd_bat attributes for better integration on Windows. Genrules generate one or more files using a user-defined Bash command.

C++ support has been improved so that Bazel now supports ThinLTO builds on Linux for Clang versions 6.0 onwards. ThinLTO compilation is a new type of LTO (Link Time Optimization) that is both scalable and incremental.

Java support has also been improved so that plain HTTP URLs are no longer permitted by maven_jar and maven_server without a specified checksum.

Bazel is available for download on GitHub.

More Information

Bazel On GitHub

Bazel HomePage

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