Bazel is the open-source version of Google's internal build system, featuring fast incremental compiles and remote caching for distributed builds.
It proved really fast on some of the benchmarks I ran, so I decided to try using it to build ROS packages.
First, we use catkin to build the base set of ROS packages we need for a
simple node (roscpp, rospy, ..). Then, we can expose the resulting install
space to Bazel using the new_local_repository repository rule in the
WORKSPACE file. Bazel will then use the ros.BUILD file to understand the
contents of the catkin install space. For now, we just declare all .so files
as a single prebuilt C++ library, and all the Python code as a single Python
package.
With this setup in place, Bazel-native binaries just need to depend on the C++
and Python libraries in the @ros repository. Two simple examples live in the
src directory.
Get a shell in the docker environment:
docker-compose build && docker-compose run bazeler bash
Download and compile the ROS workspace using catkin:
./compile_ros_workspace.py
Build the Bazel workspace:
bazel build //... -s