The Bazel team is happy to announce a new version of Bazel, Bazel 0.15!

On a related note, we'll be organizing the 2018 Bazel User Conference in NYC, on October 9-10. If you would like to join us, please register at: https://goo.gl/forms/1ySgfiKXzntp6Knj2. Check out last year's session recordings on the BazelCon website.

Here are the main changes of Bazel 0.15:

C++

• C++ libraries can access data dependencies (runfiles). See usage info.
• C++ artifacts use correct extensions on Windows (.obj, .lib, and .dll).

Android

• Added support for including select Java 8 APIs into Android apps targeting pre-Nougat Android devices with --experimental_desugar_java8_libs.
• Added support for pseudo-locales en_XA and ar_XB with --android_aapt=aapt2.
• Added support for building fonts as resources.
• The native Android rules are being incrementally migrated to Skylark implementations in rules_android.

Apple

• Added the --apple_enable_auto_dsym_dbg flag.
• The non_propagated_deps attribute has been removed from objc_library and apple_binary.

Java

• The java_plugin.data attribute has been removed.

Miscellaneous changes

• Bazel now always runs binaries in with bazel run in interactive mode. The --nodirect_run command line option is now a no-op.
• The bazel run --noas_test flag is no longer supported.
• Bazel now allows almost all 7-bit ASCII characters in labels.
• Indentation on the first line of a file was previously ignored. Bazel now displays an error when it encounters such indentation.
• The --incompatible_disable_glob_tracking flag has been removed.
• SkyQuery's rbuildfiles now returns targets corresponding to broken packages.
• Introduce build support for providing cache prefetch hints.
• The --batch flag has been deprecated. For build isolation, we recommend using the --nokeep_state_after_build flag instead. This flag guarantees that no incremental in-memory state is kept between builds. In order to keep restarting the Bazel server and jvm at every build, please explicitly use the bazel shutdown command.
• The --experimental_remote_spawn_cache flag is now enabled by default. Remote caching no longer requires the --*_strategy=remote flags and fails if they are specified.
• If the --incompatible_no_support_tools_in_action_inputs flag is enabled, Skylark action inputs are no longer scanned for tools. Move any such inputs to the newly introduced 'tools' attribute.

Community

• Tony Allevato has published rules_swift which can be used to build Swift libraries and executables for Apple platforms (iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS) and Linux.
• The code formatter for bzl files is now ready: check out Buildifier. Please report any issue you have.
• Daniel Muller wrote the article Cross language API schemas with Bazel.
• Francois Stephany wrote the article about using Bazel to build polyglot mobile apps (iOS/Android).

Thank you to our contributors

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as: Benjamin Peterson, Christian Verkerk, Dmitry Petrashko, Ed Baunton, Jamie, Kelsey Z, Natan Silnitsky, Siddhartha Bagaria, and Taras Tsugrii.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release!

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