Google Releases Bazel 1.0 Build System With Faster Build Performance

Google open-sourced their Bazel build system four years ago while today it reached version 1.0 for this multi-language, multi-platform build solution.

Bazel is Google's preferred build system used by many of their own software projects. Bazel is focused on providing automated testing and release processes while supporting "language and platform diversity" and other features catered towards their workflow. Bazel 1.0 comes at a time when many open-source projects have recently been switching to Meson+Ninja as the popular build system these days for its fast build times and great multi-platform build support. Bazel also still has to compete with the likes of CMake and many others.

In a switch from Maven to Bazel build systems, Redfin's engineering team reported 10x faster build performance. Test times were also reduced by around three fold.

Bazel 1.0 GA brings semantic versioning, long-term support, and well-rounded features for Angular / Android / Java / C++. The Bazel build system remains focused on being fast and correct, multi-language, multi-platform, uniform extension language, and the ability to scale.

More details on Bazel 1.0 via the Google Open-Source Blog and Bazel.build as the project site.