We’re partway through a migration of our build system to Bazel. Bazel is a modern build system with better performance characteristics and correctness guarantees than we currently have with make/go build. Today, you can perform most almost all day-to-day CRDB dev tasks with Bazel rather than with make. make -- and for is deprecated and we will remove this option for building Cockroach at some point in the next release cycle.
For the few tasks that you can’t/don’t can't/don't know how to do with Bazel, please ask a question or contribute a solution. The Bazel migration is actively in progress and we always accept contributions even for minor/QOL improvements.
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Follow the directions on "Getting and building CockroachDB from source" or "Building from source on macOS" to get your development environment set up. If you’ve installed everything you need for the make build, you should already have more than enough for the Bazel build – for example, you don’t actually need Golang installed to build with Bazel (the Bazel build will download Go toolchain bits as needed).
Note that you do need a full installation of XCode to build on macOS. (No, a command-line tools instance does not suffice.) If you’ve already installed a command-line tools instance as part of setting up Homebrew or other tools, switch to the full XCode instance and accept the XCode license agreement with:
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