What does HackerNews think of rules_python?

Using Python with Bazel is fairly common at big SV companies -- they use rules_python with it (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python). It does rely on pip for grabbing dependencies but handles building modules and can integrates well with rules_docker/rules_oci for building container images from your code.

Python support in Bazel now looks more promising with `rules_python`: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python

`rules_go` to my understanding is great too.

Over years, Bazel is not as opinionated as before, mostly because adoptions in different orgs force it to be so.

I have personally run converted build systems to Bazel, and use it for personal projects as well.

Bazel 1.0 was released in October 2019. If you were using it "a few years ago", I'm guessing you were using a pre-1.0 version. There's not some cutoff where Bazel magically got easy to use, and I still wouldn't describe it as "easy", but the problem it solves is hard to solve well, and the community support for Bazel has gotten a lot better over the past years.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python

The difficulty and complexity of using Bazel is highly variable. I've seen some projects where using Bazel is just super simple and easy, and some projects where using Bazel required a massive effort (custom toolchains and the like).