▲ 4 ▼ Building Uber's Go Monorepo with Bazel

In traditional industries such as automobile or aerospace, engineers first design the products and the manufacturing facilities produce the cars or aircrafts according to the design. In software development, a build system is similar to the manufacturing facilities that take the source code and turn it into services, tools, and applications. Besides facilitating software compilation and linking, build systems often need to generate code, download external packages, or build different installation packages. Some build systems can also manage tools, such as compilers, linkers and code generators, making the build artifacts less dependent on their local environments. When Uber started leveraging Go to develop our back-end services, we used the popular open source build system Make in combination with Go’s default build system go build.