Choosing the Right Build System for a Multi-Tech Stack Monorepo Project

I've been investing some time in a personal project of mine, which I'm developing with a diverse tech stack that includes a React Native app, a Next.js app, a Chrome extension, and a Golang for API. I'm planning on organizing my codebase in a monorepo architecture to foster an easier and more efficient development process.

As it stands, I'm at a crossroads in deciding which build system to adopt for my project. The top contenders are Nx, Bazel, and Turborepo.

Each has its own distinct advantages, which has left me in a dilemma:

Nx is powerful and flexible, offering first-class support for monorepos and a bevy of plugins for different technologies.
Bazel provides impressive build speeds and supports a multitude of languages, but it comes with a steeper learning curve.
Turborepo, while the newest, is promising, with its laser focus on speed and simplicity.

In addition to making the best choice for my project, I also want to use this opportunity to gain proficiency in a tool that is widely recognized and valued in the industry, to stay job-ready and competitive.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could share your experiences, insights, or recommendations based on the nature of my project. I'm interested in hearing about the pros and cons of these systems, how they've been beneficial (or not) to your projects, and your views on their industry adoption.

Thank you in advance for your time and help. Looking forward to learning from your responses!

Solution

The answer could be different and based on individual choice. But I would like to share few points on Bazel.

Bazel is a highly scalable (it can handle large builds; at Google, it is common for a server binary to have 100k source files, and builds where no files were changed take about ~200ms) build system.
Bazel supports multiple languages (Java, JavaScript, Go, C++, to name a few) and platforms (Linux, macOS, and Windows).
It’s built with Starlark, a high-level language similar to Python that allows it to perform complex operations on binaries, scripts, and data sets.
Even for large source files, Bazel is blazingly fast at building, as it caches previous work and rebuilds only the code that needs to be.

Bazel could be best choice even if your projects has large codebase, extensive tests, written in multiple language and you want to deploy on multiple platforms. Please refer bazel FAQ for more details.

Bazel community is very active and you can get your query resolved with best resolutions. Also, you can raise your issue here for any bug or feature request you wanted to add (based on usecase).

Thanks! Hope this could help you to choose your best build tool for your project.