The Bazel Show

In this episode recorded April 22, 2022, we discuss the Robinhood iOS platform team’s journey towards Bazel with Billy Irwin. We discuss the benefits & shortcomings of existing tools, the motivation to adopt Bazel, modularization of iOS apps at scale, the inevitability of ever-growing build & test times, the move away from Objective-C and mixed-source modules in favor of Swift, the Bazel onboarding process itself, the state of Bazel support & community support for mobile organizations, and other benefits of Bazel for iOS.

In this episode we will sit with Max Elliot, the author of Bazel-Diff, to discuss the topic of precise target selection algorithm between git revisions. The importance of the Bazel-Diff project lies in its philosophy's alignment with that of Bazel's core – avoiding doing unnecessary work. Max covers the motivation, evolution and the desirable future of the project. Enjoy! 

In this episode we discuss Reddits journey to Bazel, XcodeGen, XcodeGenGen(Bazel-defined XcodeGen) as the first step of the migration process, the value of cleaning up app architecture before migration, rules_ios, cocoapods-bazel, and more. iOS 💚 Bazel! 

Joining us again on the show is Jerry Marino, back again to discuss his journey as an early adopter and trailblazer in the early days of Bazel for iOS. We discuss the history of iOS build tooling, the motivation to adopt Bazel, the genesis of some of his early contributions to the ecosystem such as XCHammer & podToBUILD, as well as his current work on rules_ios at Block, and briefly discuss the potential of improving Bazel remote caching & execution through use of a CDN.

We sit down with Jerry Marino from Block (formerly known as Square) and Bogo Giertler from Reddit to talk about building iOS apps for the new Apple silicon machines and some common challenges there. We discuss arm64-to-sim, a tool Bogo created to port native ARM64 device binaries to run on the Apple Silicon iOS Simulator, and then discuss production usage of it with Jerry.

In this episode we discuss bzlmod with Yun Peng and Xudon Yang from Google. We touch on the motivation behind it, design process and major design decisions as well as the current challenges and the roadmap.

In this episode we discuss the struggles and the joy of building iOS apps with Bazel with Keith, who is a mobile tooling engineer at Lyft, the lead maintainer of rules_apple and rules_swift and an active contributor in the Bazel community.

In this episode we will discuss Remote Asset API with John Millikin from Stripe, who is a co-author of the original proposal.