[llvm-dev] [PROPOSAL] Add Bazel Build Configuration to the LLVM Monorepo

Wed Jun 16 11:14:28 PDT 2021

I'd like to follow up here because the patch to introduce these files has
been updated and available for review for some time now (about 3 weeks)
without reviewer attention. Could interested parties please take a look?

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 6:33 PM Chris Lattner via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi Adrian,
>
> This proposal is not changing the LLVM build system.  We are sticking with
> cmake.  This is just checking in some extra files into the repository to
> help out a sub community that cares about bazel.  As others mentioned, this
> was discussed in depth in the proposal and related threads,
>
> -Chris
>
> > On Mar 25, 2021, at 1:10 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hello David!
> >
> > On 3/25/21 7:12 PM, David Blaikie wrote:
> >> (full disclosure, I am a Google employee)
> >>
> >> I don't think this is appropriate content, communication, or tone for
> the
> >> LLVM community.
> >
> > Since English is not my native language, my wording may not convey 100%
> what I'm
> > trying to say and my tone may seem inappropriate. However, is not my
> intention to
> > be rude, I'm just trying to raise some concerns given the current state
> of Bazel
> > and the personal experiences I made with some Google projects in the
> past.
> >
> >>> Looking at the amount of copy-and-paste code in Bazel [1], I'm not
> really
> >>> convinced
> >>> that the code quality of Bazel speaks for itself.
> >>>
> >>
> >> This patch doesn't seem to me to be reflective of "good" or "bad" code,
> nor
> >> has anyone made any claim about the code quality of Bazel. It isn't
> >> relevant to this discussion.
> >
> > My personal concern is that Bazel will eventually have an impact on the
> portability
> > of LLVM or any other projects that adopt it like Chromium did in the
> past with project
> > adopting it as their HTML rendering engine. Looking at the current build
> status of Bazel
> > in Debian, it builds on 6 of the 23 architecture/platform combinations
> that Debian
> > supports,
> >
> >>
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=bazel-bootstrap&suite=sid
> >
> > which I find rather suboptimal for a build system. The build system
> should not be
> > the limiting factor when it comes to portability and I know no other
> build system
> > besides "gn" which has similar portability issues. cmake, meson, scons,
> qmake and
> > so on don't have these portability limitations. They just work on any
> target you
> > compile them for and they can also easily be bootstrapped.
> >
> > For "gn", I needed to download a prebuilt build-enviroment (IIRC a whole
> chroot) to
> > build it from source back then. I don't know if that has changed in the
> meantime.
> >
> >>> I wish it would be more balanced and Google would allow patches in
> >>> Chromium or V8
> >>> to support more architectures if - on the other hand - they ask other
> >>> upstream
> >>> projects to carry support for their usecases.
> >>
> >> These seem like unhelpful ad-hominem criticisms that aren't relevant to
> the
> >> matter being discussed. This proposal has been specifically designed to
> be
> >> minimally impactful to the community (should only be "there are some
> more
> >> commits to the project/more commit list emails" - and if gn is anything
> to
> >> go by, not many (<0.1% I'd wager, at a rough guess)).
> >
> > I don't think that stating facts are ad-hominem attacks. I made similar
> experiences
> > with Google projects and I found these experiences frustrating. In
> particular, one
> > of the experiences was an endianness issue with Skia [1] which has also
> seen wider
> > adoption in other projects which means missing portability hurts the
> portability of
> > these projects. There was also a SPARC port for Go which got rejected
> due to lack of
> > interest by the upstream project and the POWER port of Chromium [2]
> which got never
> > merged for whatever reason. As a result, any project that adopts any of
> these technologies
> > will reduce its portability.
> >
> > KMail, KDE's email client, for example used to be highly portable and
> was available
> > of all of Debian's supported architectures/platforms. Nowadays, KMail
> just runs
> > on the few architectures that Chromium supports which I consider a step
> backwards.
> >
> > So I personally would like to see that Bazel becomes as portable as any
> other commonly
> > used build system before it is advertised as a versatile and advanced
> build system so
> > that it's not going to have the same impacts on portability as Chromium
> does.
> >
> > Adrian
> >
> >> [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/skia/issues/detail?id=7808
> >> [2]
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/MYq1DPz9Tak
> >
> > --
> > .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> > : :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
> > `. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
> >  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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