| Project: /_project.yaml |
| Book: /_book.yaml |
| # Bazel roadmap |
| ## Overview |
| The Bazel project constantly evolves in response to your needs — developing features and providing support while maintaining, refactoring, and improving the performance of the core product. |
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| With these changes, we’re looking to keep our open-source community informed and included. This roadmap describes current initiatives and predictions for the future of Bazel development, giving you visibility into current priorities and ongoing projects. |
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| This roadmap snapshots targets, and should not be taken as guarantees. Priorities are subject to change in response to developer and customer feedback, or new market opportunities. |
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| To be notified of new features — including updates to this roadmap — join the [Google Group](https://groups.google.com/g/bazel-discuss) community. |
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| ## Q4 — Bazel 6.0 Release |
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| Q4 brings Bazel 6.0 — the new [long term support (LTS)](https://bazel.build/release/versioning) version. Bazel 6.0 plans to include new powerful and community-requested features for managing dependencies, developing with Android, and more. |
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| ### Bzlmod: external dependency management system |
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| [Bzlmod](https://bazel.build/docs/bzlmod) automatically resolves transitive dependencies, allowing projects to scale while staying fast and resource-efficient. Introduced experimentally in Bazel 5.0, Bzlmod will be generally available and provide a solution for the [diamond dependency problem](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1moQfNcEIttsk6vYanNKIy3ZuK53hQUFq1b1r0rmsYVg/edit#heading=h.lgyp7ubwxmjc). |
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| * Bzlmod goes from ‘experimental’ to ‘generally available’ |
| * Includes support for `rules\_jvm\_external`, allowing users to download Maven dependencies for Java projects |
| * [Bzlmod Migration Guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtXIVnXyFZ4bmbiBCr5gsTH4-opZAFf5DMMb-54kES0/edit?usp=gmail) provides tools, scripts, and documentation to teams looking to adopt Bzlmod |
| * The [Bazel central repository](https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-central-registry) hosts core Bazel `BUILD` rules (`rules\_jvm\_external`, `rules\_go`, `rules\_python`, `rules\_nodejs`) and key dependencies required for Bzlmod |
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| For more on this development, watch the [Bzlmod community update](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuW5XNcFukE) or read the [original design doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1moQfNcEIttsk6vYanNKIy3ZuK53hQUFq1b1r0rmsYVg/edit#heading=h.lgyp7ubwxmjc). |
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| ### Android app build with Bazel |
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| Bazel 6.0 will include improved tooling and merged-in community feature contributions. Anticipating further adoption and a growing codebase, the Bazel team will prioritize integration of Android build tools with Bazel Android rules. |
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| * Updates D8 to v. 3.3.28 and sets it as the [default dexer](https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/10240). |
| * Merges to main community feature contributions added in 5.X including support for: |
| * Persistent workers with D8 |
| * Desugaring using D8 |
| * Merging "uses-permissions" tags in Android manifests |
| * Multiplex workers in Android resource processing |
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| ### Optional toolchains |
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| Our Developer Satisfaction survey showed that rule authors want support for further toolchain development. Bazel 6.0 will allow authors to write rules using an [optional, high performance toolchain](https://bazel.build/docs/toolchains#optional-toolchains) when available with a fallback implementation for other platforms. |
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| ### Bazel-JetBrains\* IntelliJ IDEA support |
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| JetBrains has partnered with Bazel to co-maintain the [Bazel IntelliJ IDEA plugin](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8609-bazel), supporting the goal of increasing community stewardship and opening up capacity for feature requests and development. |
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| * IntelliJ plugin v. 2022.2 provides support for the latest JetBrains plugin release |
| * Increases compatibility with remote development |
| * Furthers community-driven development for in-flight features such as Scala support |
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| For more on this development, read the Bazel-JetBrains [blog announcement](https://blog.bazel.build/2022/07/11/Bazel-IntelliJ-Update.html). |
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| ## Future development |
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| Looking ahead, the Bazel team has begun development or anticipates prioritizing the following features in 2023 and beyond. |
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| ### Improving Bazel's Android build rules |
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| Continue to invest in the Android app development experience, focusing on the workflow through build, test, and deployment. |
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| * Migration to and support for R8 |
| * Updates to the Android rules, including translation to the Starlark language |
| * Support for App Bundle |
| * Support for recent NDK versions |
| * Test code coverage |
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| ### OSS license compliance tools |
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| Developers requested a robust license compliance checker to ensure the availability and security of included packages. This project provides a set of rules and tools to help identify and mitigate compliance and license risks associated with a given software component. Target features include: |
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| * The ability to audit the packages used by a given target |
| * The ability to build organization specific license compliance checks. |
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| See the in-progress [rules\_license implementation](https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_license) on Github. |
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| ### Bzlmod: external dependency management system |
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| At launch, Bzlmod improves the scalability and reliability of transitive dependencies. Over the next three years, Bzlmod aims to replace `WORKSPACE` as the default Bazel workspace dependency management subsystem. Targeted features include: |
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| * Support for hermetic builds |
| * Vendor/offline mode pinning versioned references rules to a local copy |
| * Bazel Central Registry includes regular community contribution and adoption of key Bazel rules & projects |
| * Bzlmod becomes the default tool for building Bazel projects |
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| ### Signed builds |
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| Bazel will provide trusted binaries for Windows and Mac signed with Google keys. This feature enables multi-platform developers/dev-ops to identify the source of Bazel binaries and protect their systems from malicious, unverified binaries. |
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| ### Standardized Platforms API |
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| The new Platforms API will standardize the architecture configuration for multi-language, multi-platform builds. With this feature, developers can reduce costly development-time errors and complexity in their large builds. |
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| ### Build analysis metrics |
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| Bazel telemetry will provide analysis-phase time metrics, letting developers optimize their own build performance. |
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| ### Remote execution with “Builds without the Bytes” |
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| [Builds without the Bytes](https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/6862) will optimize performance by only allowing Bazel to download needed artifacts, preventing builds from bottlenecking on network bandwidth. Features added for remote builds include: |
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| * Use asynchronous download to let local and remote actions kick off as soon as they’ve downloaded their dependent outputs |
| * Add Symlinks support |
| * Retrieve intermediate outputs from remote actions once a build completes |
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| _\*Copyright © 2022 JetBrains s.r.o. JetBrains and IntelliJ are registered trademarks of JetBrains s.r.o._ |
