How Bazel 7.0 Makes Your Builds Faster

Bazel 7.0 introduces numerous optimizations aimed at speeding up builds for users. These improvements include faster loading and analysis phases due to Starlark interpreter optimizations, quicker execution of actions that output symlinks or large tree artifacts, and better default CPU utilization in containers on Linux. Additionally, the Android rules have added persistent worker support to more actions, and remote caching and execution processes are now more efficient. The BLAKE3 hash function is also supported for file digest computation, which can be significantly faster than SHA-256 for large files. Furthermore, Build without the Bytes feature has seen performance enhancements and bug fixes, making it the default value for the --remote_download_outputs flag in Bazel 7.0. Lastly, Bzlmod lockfile is now stable, offering faster fresh Bazel server launches and offline build capabilities.