Bazel

Came across bazel build system recently at my new job and found it to be quite nice compared to my earlier mainstays CMake and Make. It’s fast and correct, just as their website says. But I also liked it because it’s explicit with very little magic. And it has a powerful query/tools system that allows you to really analyze your builds and dependencies in depth. Though examples in the wild are a bit less since it is a fairly recent entrant compared to its competitors. For a personal side project, I needed to use SDL2 and it was the first time I had to use an external/pre-built library with bazel. This post documents the process I used for my own future reference and may be help some other lost soul like me. Although, the post talks about SDL2 here specifically, the same process can be used for most other external pre-compiled modules.