This repo is an example of how one can get an SDL3 C++ project building with Bazel 8 by using modules.

If you just want to clone this repo and get started, the Bazel invocation you seek is:

bazel run //:sdl3-test

I recommend using Bazelisk to manage Bazel versions and make use of the .bazelversion file in the repo.

I'm not a Bazel expert, so this may be a flawed explanation!

First, I'd like to credit a Gist from @k-bharadwaj which gave me a starting point. Their Gist doesn't use modules, though, so I had to change a few things.

The point I started with from there was the MODULE.bazel file. In there, we declare two external dependencies for the project: SDL3 in the form of an archive, and the rules_foreign_cc module, which provides Cmake and other build toolchains.

rules_foreign_cc exists in the Bazel Central Registry, so we can just declare it with bazel_dep, specify the version, and it's good to go.

SDL isn't in there for now, so we have to use the no-longer-built-in http_archive rule to download and extract the latest 3.2 release from Github.

The Gist seems to use an older version of Bazel, but on Bazel 8, BUILD files can only have the name BUILD. That's one change.

Inside the cmake invocation, I needed to make a couple changes. First, I needed to specify defines for my platform (Linux on WSL, specifically), but I just used the "default" case. Here's where you can put any of the Cmake arguments that start with -D, and specify platforms if needed.

The other thing was I needed to add the Linux condition for the produced shared library, and I added the Windows one as well. At first, I didn't realize the produced filename has a .0 at the end, so this was a minor skill issue.

I tried briefly to have this step make a static library, but didn't have much success using the defines parameter and omitting the out_shared_libs parameter. I'm sure it's possible - but I haven't figured it out yet.

The last piece is the top-level BUILD file, which is pretty much as-is from the Gist. Specify a binary with main.cpp as the source file list, specify the SDL3 built with the Cmake step as a dependency, and then it works!