JetBrains Steps Up: Enhancing Bazel Support in CLion

Daniel Brauner

JetBrains has officially taken over development and maintenance of the Bazel for CLion and Bazel for IntelliJ plugins. This shift allows us to tackle long-standing issues and improve the overall experience of working with Bazel projects in JetBrains IDEs. As of July 2025, these plugins are no longer offered by, nor affiliated with, Google.

What’s changing

Bazel for CLion: We’re continuing active development of the plugin with a focus on improving stability, addressing performance bottlenecks, and resolving the most common user-reported issues.

Bazel for IntelliJ: The plugin has been deprecated. JetBrains is maintaining it for now solely to keep it compatible with newer IntelliJ IDEA versions, but no new features will be added. The Bazel team has released a new plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, and PyCharm and is actively developing it. Read the blog post to learn more about it: Bazel Plugin Release: General Availability.

What’s new in Bazel for CLion

Starting with v2025.06.24.0.1, the plugin includes the first batch of improvements, particularly around the Virtual File System (VFS). We’ve started addressing the causes behind frequent Refreshing files dialogs and connection drops during remote development.

To ensure these fixes take effect in your IDE, update and then run the File | Invalidate Caches action with the Clear file system cache and Local History option selected.

What’s next

We’re prioritizing the following areas:

• Enhanced custom toolchain support: We’re working on improving support for more complex project setups. This includes adding support for custom sysroots and introducing support for Clang-CL on Windows, which will give you more flexibility in your development environment.
• Continued VFS and performance issues: The initial fixes are just the beginning. Continued VFS optimization remains one of our highest priorities.
• Better support for virtual includes: We’re also looking into providing better support for virtual includes and generated sources. We understand the importance of this for effectively navigating complex Bazel projects.

Long-term vision

Our goal is to eventually provide C and C++ support directly in the new JetBrains Bazel plugin. But before we can do that, two things must happen: The new plugin needs to have matured its Kotlin and Java support through wide real-world usage and user feedback, and we need to be able deliver the same comprehensive C and C++ experience that CLion users expect.

In the meantime, Bazel for CLion will continue to be fully supported and maintained.

Share your feedback

Your feedback is essential to making this transition successful and ensuring our improvements effectively address real-world challenges. If your project experiences the VFS symptoms we mentioned or relies on a custom toolchain that doesn’t work properly with the plugin, we want to hear from you. Please share your feedback in our issue tracker or in the comments below. Help us shape the future of Bazel at JetBrains!

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