alt Hacker News>There are three implementations (Go, Rust, Java)
There are so many people at Google just goofing around, lol. People just doing hobby stuff for $350k/year.
There is no justification to implement this custom dialect of Python for a build system that drives everyone crazy 3 times. Reminds me of when it was revealed that 400 people were working on Fuschia — a hobby OS that only shipped on a single smart home device.
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IIRC initially blaze was literally using python as a config layer. That made it too easy to write build scripts that were too slow and too hard to optimize and that negatively affected the overall build experience.
An increase in edit/build/run cycle efficiency of thousands of employees justifies an investment of a few engineers.
They could have invented a new bespoke DSL. Instead they choose to stick to a well known and familiar language and just limit its expressiveness to a subset that would be easier to optimize. I think that's quite reasonable
Of the three, only two are Google produced. The rust implementation is written by Facebook for use in their build system. The java implementation is the original but is pretty tied to the the bazel build system and not really very suitable to other uses. The go implementation is meant to be embeddable into a varying number of applications.
An example application is https://github.com/shac-project/shac
Within Google, there a large number of similar tools which are written in go and harness the starlark language. While there are plenty of other options, I will say I think starlark is often a great choice.
I'm not sure. I understand what you are trying to say - do you think we should give up on OS diversity? Are you making fun of a company for actually investing in something ambitious which can benefit many if successful?
While I'm not sure you are in the same crowd, I always think it's interesting that the HN hivemind tends to be upset with the browser monoculture, but doesn't bat an eye at OS monoculture. It feels like you're really just channeling feelings about the company rather than the projects.
One of my hobbies while at Google (2010-2015) was to watch the multiple failed attempts to get rid of Borg Config Language and actual Python in Blaze. It took a lot of work until they eventually succeeded. You're probably underestimating the rigor, the pain, and also the value involved in cleaning those things up: being able to cleanly operate programmatically at scale in the Google monorepo is extremely necessary.
(This is also why I don't trust configuration languages built by people who _didn't_ observe the years of pain. Cue and jsonnet are notable projects that were able to incorporate a lot of lessons.)