Bazel vs Lerna

Overview

Bazel

Stacks313

Followers579

Votes133

Lerna

Stacks1.2K

Followers137

Votes0

GitHub Stars36.0K

Forks2.3K

Bazel vs Lerna: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Bazel and Lerna are both build tools used in software development to streamline processes and improve efficiency in managing dependencies and builds. However, they have key differences that cater to different needs of developers and projects.

Language Support: Bazel primarily focuses on supporting multiple languages like C++, Java, and Python, whereas Lerna is more tailored towards JavaScript and Node.js projects. This difference in language support makes Bazel more versatile for projects using a variety of languages, while Lerna is ideal for JavaScript-centric projects.
Monorepo Handling: Bazel excels in managing monorepos efficiently by providing tools for scalability and performance optimization when handling large codebases. On the other hand, Lerna is specifically designed to work with monorepos in JavaScript projects, offering features like versioning and package management within a monorepo structure.
Dependency Management: Bazel emphasizes a binary package approach with built-in caching mechanisms to optimize dependency management and build processes, ensuring faster and more reliable builds. In contrast, Lerna focuses on managing dependencies at the package level within a monorepo, with features like independent versioning to handle dependencies across multiple packages.
Scalability: Bazel is preferred for larger-scale projects due to its ability to handle complex build setups and optimize build times, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. Lerna, while effective for smaller to medium-sized projects, may face limitations in scalability when dealing with significantly large codebases and numerous dependencies.
Build Performance: Bazel prioritizes build performance by leveraging advanced caching strategies and parallel execution of build tasks to minimize build times and improve overall productivity. Lerna, while efficient for JavaScript projects, may not offer the same level of performance optimizations in build processes compared to Bazel, especially in scenarios requiring significant parallel processing.
Community Support: Bazel is backed by Google and has a robust community contributing to its development, ensuring continuous improvements and updates, as well as strong documentation and support resources. On the other hand, Lerna has a dedicated community within the JavaScript ecosystem, providing specific support and resources tailored towards JavaScript developers and projects.

In Summary, Bazel and Lerna differ in terms of language support, monorepo handling, dependency management, scalability, build performance, and community support, catering to diverse project requirements and development environments.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Bazel	Lerna
Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.	It is a popular and widely used package written in JavaScript. It optimizes the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm.
Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 36.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 313	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 579	Followers 137
Votes 133	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Constant breaking changes 1 Lack of Documentation 1 Learning Curve	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Java Objective-C C++	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Bazel, Lerna?

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Immutable.js

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Related Comparisons

Bazel vs Lerna: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Language Support: Bazel primarily focuses on supporting multiple languages like C++, Java, and Python, whereas Lerna is more tailored towards JavaScript and Node.js projects. This difference in language support makes Bazel more versatile for projects using a variety of languages, while Lerna is ideal for JavaScript-centric projects.
Monorepo Handling: Bazel excels in managing monorepos efficiently by providing tools for scalability and performance optimization when handling large codebases. On the other hand, Lerna is specifically designed to work with monorepos in JavaScript projects, offering features like versioning and package management within a monorepo structure.
Dependency Management: Bazel emphasizes a binary package approach with built-in caching mechanisms to optimize dependency management and build processes, ensuring faster and more reliable builds. In contrast, Lerna focuses on managing dependencies at the package level within a monorepo, with features like independent versioning to handle dependencies across multiple packages.
Scalability: Bazel is preferred for larger-scale projects due to its ability to handle complex build setups and optimize build times, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. Lerna, while effective for smaller to medium-sized projects, may face limitations in scalability when dealing with significantly large codebases and numerous dependencies.
Build Performance: Bazel prioritizes build performance by leveraging advanced caching strategies and parallel execution of build tasks to minimize build times and improve overall productivity. Lerna, while efficient for JavaScript projects, may not offer the same level of performance optimizations in build processes compared to Bazel, especially in scenarios requiring significant parallel processing.
Community Support: Bazel is backed by Google and has a robust community contributing to its development, ensuring continuous improvements and updates, as well as strong documentation and support resources. On the other hand, Lerna has a dedicated community within the JavaScript ecosystem, providing specific support and resources tailored towards JavaScript developers and projects.

Bazel vs Lerna

Overview