Bazel Blog

Bazel Conference 2017

Bazel team is pleased to announce our first annual Bazel Conference, focused on the needs of our community. The conference will feature user stories and feedback, migration talks, roadmap, hands-on and break-out tech sessions with Bazel engineers, contributors and users.

Introducing sandboxfs

sandboxfs is a new project to improve the way sandboxing works in Bazel by making it more efficient and correct. It's experimental and subject to change, but it's available now for you to check out! Read on for details.

Backward compatibility

Bazel is in Beta and we are working hard towards Bazel 1.0 (see the roadmap). We are not there yet, and there are still many things we want to change, clean, and improve. Future releases of Bazel will not be 100% compatible with all previous Beta versions. We understand that breaking changes can be painful for users. That's why we want to make it as easy as we can to migrate to new Bazel versions.

A new logo and homepage for Bazel

We are glad to unveil a new logo for Bazel:

Strict Java Deps and `unused_deps`

This blog post describes how Bazel implements "strict deps" for Java compilations ("SJD"), and how it is leveraged in unused_deps, a tool to remove unused dependencies. It is my hope this knowledge will help write rules for similar JVM-based languages such as Scala and Kotlin.

Google Summer of Code 2017

Thank you very much to everyone who applied for Google Summer of Code with Bazel. We received many interesting proposals, and we are excited to see that so many of you are enthusiastic about Bazel. Since this is the first Google Summer of Code with Bazel, we decided to mentor only one student. Of course, you are all welcome to contribute to our projects, even if it is outside of Google Summer of Code.

Bazel 0.5.0 Released

We are delighted to announce the 0.5.0 release of Bazel (follow the link for the full release notes and list of changes).

JDK7 deprecation

The Bazel team has been maintaining a separate, stripped-down build of Bazel that runs with JDK 7. The 0.5.1 release will no longer provide this special version.

A glimpse of the design of Skylark

This blog post describes the design of Skylark, the language used to specify builds in Bazel.

Skylark and Java rules interoperability

As of Bazel 0.4.4, Java compilation is possible from a Skylark rule. This facilitates the Skylark and Java interoperability and allows creating what we call Java sandwiches in Bazel.