I'd suggest you revise your competitor analysis. Bazel definitely has a test command that with remote execution and caching absolutely allows you to run entire test suites in seconds* both locally and in CI eg. https://blog.aspect.build/typescript-with-rbe
> This blog post says 2 and a half minutes not seconds.
It's meaningless to say "we can run tests in seconds". You can't run my tests in seconds because they're single threaded and take 10 minutes. The important thing is the speedup, and they got a pretty good speedup. Arguably the nop build/test time is important too but it doesn't look like they measured that.
> Basel does not solve this problem out of the box.
Yes it does.
> I wonder why stripe didn’t “just use Bazel”.
In my experience it's because setting up Bazel is a) more work than setting up some ad-hoc build system (Make or CMake or whatever) and b) difficult to switch to retrospectively. So it only gets used where you have people who are experienced enough to know that you will wish you had started with it, and can convince the inexperienced people that it's worth the effort.
Usually you get too many inexperienced people saying "it's too difficult; we'll be fine with Make".
Stripe does use Bazel. It just didn't exist before Stripe built some of its own internal systems, but it's gradually replacing ~everything from a build standpoint.
The one thing to know about Bazel is that it's both incredibly impressive, and also one of the least ergonomic pieces of software ever created. It's very clearly an internal project which was cleaned up and open sourced without any attempt to make it more usable outside of Google.
Bazel's kind of like Kubernetes in a way -- you don't actually get enough benefits to adopt it until you're at a certain point in the company lifecycle, and to get to that point you usually have to build other systems first. Then you have to gradually replace those systems with Bazel.
First release of Basel was in 2015 when Stripe was already 5 years old and the progenitor of this tooling was already running with several dozen users.
