CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bazel
jxramos
jxramos

Reputation: 8266

Are the bazel buildtools primarily focused on single starlark files?

I'm taking a glance over at the buildtools repo (https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools) and trying to understand the scope of its responsibilities as it relates to the three phases of a bazel build (loading, analysis, execution)

The repo's description states that it is A bazel BUILD file formatter and editor. I find much logic in the repo written in go-lang that lends complete support for an AST parser, starlark syntax interpreting capabilities, reformatting and rewriting of BUILD files and what not. Basically there's logic designed to operate upon a single starlark file at a time. Rereading that repo description in this light leads me to conclude that buildtools is really a single file scoped effort and presents tools that only intersect functionality wise (perhaps only partially) to those loading operations bazel conducts while building.

Question: Is it accurate that the focus of buildtools is upon the single starlark file?

If that's true then all the multiple starlark file analysis logic and so forth seems to actually be maintained over at https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/tree/master/src/main/java/com/google/devtools/build/lib and I should not expect to find any tools for the analysis phase and beyond in the buildtools repo. Is that right?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 346

Answers (2)

Laurent
Laurent

Reputation: 2999

buildtools has tools working on a syntactic level (it looks at the syntax tree). These tools are outside of Bazel and have no knowledge of Bazel build phases. In the future, we may expand the code to work on multiple files (for the static analysis), but it will still be independent from Bazel phases.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/tree/master/src/main/java/com/google/devtools/build/lib/ is the source code of Bazel. The syntax/ directory includes the code for reading and evaluating the Starlark files. The code there is called by Skyframe. The interpreter is called by Skyframe many times in parallel, both during the loading and the analysis phases.

If you have a more specific question (what are you trying to do?), I can help more. :)

Upvotes: 1

László
László

Reputation: 4271

I don't work on Buildtools, but we agree: these tools seem to focus on BUILD / .bzl files in isolation. They let you process these files in parallel, to do similar operations on them.

If you wonder whether these tools understand relations between these files, the answer seems to be no.

If you further wonder what tools do then, the answer is Bazel's query, cquery, and aquery. I'm not aware of a programmable API for these queries though; you have to run Bazel to perform them.

Upvotes: 3

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