Building Self Driving Cars with Bazel + Q&A
summary
Migration from CMake to Bazel (called Basil in the captions) happens in six months for the bulk work with one engineer converting 300 CMake files and ~3,000 C++ sources, and yields ~6x faster builds despite a 10x engineering headcount increase. Remote caching cuts a 1‑hour workstation build to ~5 minutes; Zstandard compression makes cached builds ~40% faster and stores ~6x more. Profiling into BigQuery drives fixes; enabling Google RBE and remote execution reduces CI and test time (builds ~5x faster) after ~2–4 months per phase.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:07Self-driving car challenges
- 4:21Migrating to Bazel
- 8:37Bazel migration lessons
- 10:45Measuring Bazel build performance
- 17:54Optimizing builds and tests
- 24:19Remote execution for builds
- 31:26Remote test execution
- 34:14Remote execution lessons
- 36:24Q&A
