Maybe add Bazel support?

[evilmucedin]

It seems that Bazel is becoming a popular build tool. I think that Bazel is easier to support than CMake.

Are you potentially interested in using Bazel? I can help you with implementation.

[andrey-khropov]

The source of truth for CatBoost build configuration is in Ya Make configuration files.
CMake build files are generated from those when exporting to GitHub using a tool called yexport.
The proper way to support an alternative build system like Bazel is to add an additional "build generator" to yexport (and enable it for CatBoost after that). Export generators live here.

But judging from the limited community interest so far (you are the first person requesting this in many years) and the nontrivial support cost I don't think it is worth it at the moment.
I am personally not a big fan of CMake but it is still the most widely used cross-platform build system by far, see ISO CPP Survey or JetBrains state of C++ for example.

If you need to integrate CatBoost build into your Bazel build maybe you can use something like rules-foreign-cc. We are also planning distributing CatBoost C/C++ libraries using Conan and/or vcpkg.