Can Bazel be configured to work with Clang on Android NDK?

Question

There's a note in this Bazel example for android that says:

Yes, we know that this is a little clunky. We are working on the following things (and more):

Supporting other architectures than armeabi-v7a and compilers other than GCC 4.9

Is there any way to hack around this to swap GCC for Clang until it is officially supported?

Answer 1

Bazel 0.4.5 and later support Android builds compiling with clang with NDK11 and NDK12. And with NDK13 and later, clang is the default (and gcc is not supported). With NDK11 and NDK12, you can set the --android_compiler bazel flag. For example,

$ cat WORKSPACE
android_sdk_repository(name = "androidsdk")
android_ndk_repository(name = "androidndk")

$ export ANDROID_HOME=/home/me/sdk

$ export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=/home/me/android-ndk-r12b

# uses clang
$ bazel build --android_compiler=clang3.8 //java/com/example:app

$ export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=/home/me/android-ndk-r13b

# uses clang
$ bazel build //java/com/example:app