Google uses the build tool called Blaze internally for automated building and testing of software; and the company later released it as an open-source project with the name Bazel, which is an anagram of Blaze.
Bazel will allow developers to build and test software for multiple platforms across a wide range of languages, with supported platforms including: Windows, MacOS, and Linux. While the major difference from other such build tools is that Bazel rebuilds only what is essential, and does it faster, with incremental builds enabled, allowing advanced local/distributed caching, dependency analysis, and parallel execution.
The new tool leverages on the uniform extension language called Starlark, which was formerly known as Skylark, and it's positioned for faster build speeds, with builds that are fully scalable.
Additional to the open source build tool support for a variety of languages and platforms, is also support for TensorFlow machine learning library and the Angular web framework, with semantic versioning that starts from Bazel 1.x releases that will be backward compatible to Bazel 1.0.
There will also be window of at least three months between new releases of Bazel, with some minor monthly releases.
Bazel was born of Google's needs for highly scalable builds, and was open sourced back in 2015, the company hopes that Bazel could fulfill similar needs in the broader software development landscape.
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