Keeping source code and build configuration in sync

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2022-06-23 12:00:11

Building Haskell code with Bazel brings some benefits, like builds that are hermetic (i.e. easy to reproduce), caching which allows to switch branches in your version control system and still have fast rebuilds, and tracking of cross-language dependencies.

However, till recently, changes to the source code of a module in a library would require all of the modules in the library to be rebuilt, which could be a serious limitation when using Bazel to build frequent and small changes to the code. This was a consequence of Haskell rules only being able to express dependencies between libraries and binaries.

In this post we describe haskell_module, a new rule in rules_haskell, which allows to express the dependencies between modules. With this rule, Bazel has a higher resolution of the dependency graph and can skip building modules that are certainly not affected by a change.

The inputs to this action are the compiler itself and the source files. Bazel ensures that dependencies are not missing in the build configuration by only exposing declared dependencies to the action, this is a strategy most commonly known as sandboxing.