To stay on top of bazel development, and to prepare for some future improvements, I’ve gone ahead and upgraded the moteus firmware build system, rules_mbed to use the new bazel “platforms” toolchain resolution mechanism.

Previously, rules_mbed used the “crosstool_top” bazel mechanism for toolchain configuration. This allowed a single package to contribute a set of C++ toolchains which would be selected based on CPU and compiler. One of the downsides from the rules_mbed perspective, is that it made it difficult to make a build that included both mbed targets and host targets (or anything else non-mbed). rules_mbed worked around this by including a functioning clang host toolchain within it.

With the new toolchain resolution support, at the command line you specify to bazel what “platform” you want to be the final target. The updated rules_mbed specifies a “platform” for each of the STM32 processors that are supported. So for instance you could use:

bazel build --platforms=@rules_mbed//:stm32g4 //:target

It then uses that platform to find a toolchain with a compatible operating system and CPU, which for rules_mbed is the arm-gcc compiler for the correct chip.

Because of this, the command lines necessary to compile the moteus firmware and host side tools have changed. Rather than expose the raw bazel options, it now just uses a bazel config to abstract away whatever mechanisms are required. So, the two necessary new command lines are:

tools/bazel test --config=target //:target  # build firmware
tools/bazel test --config=host //:host  # build host tools

Soon, we’ll use this capability to add some useful new features to the moteus tools, such as support for non-linux operating systems.