It really is that good. I’ve been using it only over a year, but I’ve done a lot of build system work with different tools and Bazel stands out.
Most other tools seem to be competitors to Make (SCons, Jam, tup), souped-up scripting systems (Ant, Gradle), or configuration toolboxes (CMake). The ones that really stand out are the tools that tackle the problem of expressing builds in a way that’s both expressive and declarative. In my mind, these fall into two families: Gyp and Bazel (which includes Buck, Pants, Please.build, and that new custom thing Chrome uses).
(And then there’s Ninja, which I appreciate for taking a good / useful subset of Make’s features and doing it really well.)
Most other tools seem to be competitors to Make (SCons, Jam, tup), souped-up scripting systems (Ant, Gradle), or configuration toolboxes (CMake). The ones that really stand out are the tools that tackle the problem of expressing builds in a way that’s both expressive and declarative. In my mind, these fall into two families: Gyp and Bazel (which includes Buck, Pants, Please.build, and that new custom thing Chrome uses).
(And then there’s Ninja, which I appreciate for taking a good / useful subset of Make’s features and doing it really well.)