Great question. I am still relatively new to bazel but definitely wonder if in the heavily containerized world we have today there is still so much sense for platform-specific toolchains and rule implementations that ship different binaries for different platforms.

I just took over maintenance for a large bazel build env that going forward should be usable on different build machines comprising windows, linux and macos/amd64, macos/arm.

Quite frankly, I think it is kind of ridiculous to implement treatments for all these different platforms. Bazel should run in a container where the respective bazel version is installed and bazel rules should make heavy use of bash and other gnu tools that the container provides.

There should be abash rule that allows running bash scripts and a large lib of rules that build on thatbash rule to implement stuff likebase64-encode/decode,yq,jq,sed, and all these other targets that sort of naturally suggest themselves.

I really wonder why that doesn't exist yet. Wouldn't it make much more sense to use bazel that way?

Proposal:#26891