While Bazel excels in speed and accuracy, its integration with native ecosystems, particularly IDE support, has been lacking. Jay Conrod’s 2022 BazelCon talk highlighted how this hinders adoption, echoing our observations at LinkedIn. The model recommended in that talk was to have the language server use a build adapter as a liaison to Bazel to correctly resolve imports.

Since then, Bzlmod and Uber’s go_deps module extension have enabled us to treat go.mod as the source of truth for Go dependencies thereby removing the need for lengthy WORKSPACE files and constant updates via gazelle-update-repos. While these significantly moved the needle, they didn’t support multi module workspaces, still relied on the build adapter model for IDE support and had no native CLI support.

At LinkedIn, we sought to address these gaps. We added Go workspace support to Gazelle and introduced a setup rule wherein Bazel bootstraps the Go SDK, sets Go env vars such as GOPATH within the Bazel workspace and informs IDEs and shells via settings files and direnv, thus providing a seamless developer experience. This has enabled us to drive developer adoption across a poly repo ecosystem at LinkedIn.