Release 8.8.1rc1 (2026-09-22)

Bazel 8.8.1 is a patch LTS release. It is fully backward compatible with Bazel 8.0 and contains selected changes by the Bazel community and Google engineers.

Remote Execution

• Fixed a regression that caused source directories to be slower to digest for remote execution and cache lookups. (#31178)

Acknowledgments

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as Fabian Meumertzheim.

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