Most people don’t have the kind of bandwidth it takes to download a 50 MB binary? Are we still talking about Bazel here, because that’s the size of the download. What about tools like compilers? You have to download those, too.

> Running a background JVM daemon process is a NO for me and Bazel wastes system resources.

What system resources does it actually use up? A half-gig of RAM? This kind of optimization is penny-wise and pound-foolish. You are spending your precious time and energy worrying about a resource whose marginal cost to you is about the same as a cup of coffee.

I run Bazel on a terribly obsolete, seven-year-old laptop which is my daily driver. Sometimes Chrome will choke on a website, sometimes I'm waiting ages for Homebrew to update or for NPM to download some packages, but Bazel is not a problem.

I don't install tons of random garbage because I want to know and understand what is running on the hosts that I maintain.

I need to be able to debug the stuff I run, and complexity makes it difficult.

Tenths of MB of stuff is complexity. Tenths of build time or run time dependencies is complexity. A compiled tool when a script would have been sufficient is also complexity.

Bazel is way easier to debug than Make. Debugging a decent-sized build system made with Make is just an exercise in suffering.

I am… honestly… no longer interested in understanding the entire software stack. I understand my time on this earth is limited and want to spend it doing other things. With Bazel, I am spending less time fucking around with build systems and more time doing the stuff I care about.

> Tenths of MB of stuff is complexity. Tenths of build time or run time dependencies is complexity. A compiled tool when a script would have been sufficient is also complexity.

As someone who still writes C, I can understand the joy that people feel when you make some cool program and it’s measured in KB, not MB. However, what you’re describing strikes me as fetishistic.