I wonder if Bazel takes off across many languages. It wouldn't hurt to have a modern autotools & co. replacement across ecosystems. I don't think it's doable, considering the fact that we have language specific package managers and build tools, but you never know.

By "replacement", I mean picking up a random open source project and being able to do the equivalent of:

./configure

make

make install

To be able to build and run the app directly from sources, when needed.

Right now, it's a mess, the "replacement" is:

curl whatever.io | sudo bash

For that, Bazel needs someone to write all the necessary configs, and make them available out-of-the box, with sane presets baked-in.

You can look at Angular team's working on integrating Bazel into their build process, here's the repo: https://github.com/alexeagle/angular-bazel-example

There's:

- build.bazel

- Workspace

And then there are rules that have to be included and/or developed:

- nodejs rules, https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs

- sass rules https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_sass

- typescript rules: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_typescript

etc.

And those rules have to be not only loaded, but specific steps from those rules have to be invoked (see WORKSPACE).

I'd say there still still a lot of configuration involved in setting up all the moving pieces. Will it get better? Hopefully (there are just not enough good/decent build tools).