What does HackerNews think of BuildXL?

We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed | Sep 2023

Seems they came up with a way to scale up build toolchains with BuildXL[0]

Doesn't seem fully baked yet though

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL

Windows XP leak confirmed after user compiles the leaked code into a working OS | Oct 2020

Er, a few problems with the reasoning here:

1. Windows developers did not build large parts of the product on any regular basis. Windows took ~18 hours to build on incredibly powerful build lab hardware -- as soon as it took longer, it was time to buy a new build lab. Incremental rebuilds were notoriously flaky, at least in the days before https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL. The most common dev loop that I saw was to install a recent dogfood build (so APIs and binary interfaces were reasonably recent) and then repeatedly rebuild and clobber binaries on that install.

2. The only real build-configuration options for timebuild were architecture and compile mode (dbg, chk, fre, opt). There wasn't an option to build or not build parts of the tree.

3. raymondc's reference to "kernel-colored glasses" is about viewing things from the kernel side of API guarantees. This is more an applied lesson in Conway's Law.

What Is Nix? | May 2020

This sounds similar to BuildXL[1] (originally called Domino) which Microsoft uses to build Windows has been in use 6 years. It does this sandboxing using Detours on Windows which intercepts system calls and allows you to described packages in a language called DScript. I think you need something like this if you don't use a system like Bazel that keeps build dependencies well isolated. Even then the system you use can leak into the build.

1. https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL

Evaluating bazel for building Firefox, part 1 | Oct 2019

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Microsoft internally uses something pretty similar to Bazel. I'm not familiar enough with the two to fully understand motivations for the divergence. It supposedly initially ran poorly on Mac, just due to differences in what is cheap on different platforms. I wonder what kind of inherent performance differences you would find in something "Windows first" vs "Linux/MacOS first" https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL

Bazel Release 1.0.0 | Oct 2019

How does bazel compare to https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/blob/master/README.md And https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL ?