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Buck2: Our open source build system

(engineering.fb.com)
392 points mfiguiere | 5 comments | 06 Apr 23 16:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.667s | source
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RcouF1uZ4gsC ◴[06 Apr 23 16:42 UTC] No.35470953[source]▶
> Buck2 is an extensible and performant build system written in Rust

I really appreciate tooling that is written in Rust or Go that produce single binaries with minimal runtime dependencies.

Getting tooling written in for example Python to run reliably can be an exercise in frustration due to runtime environmental dependencies.

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crabbone ◴[06 Apr 23 17:26 UTC] No.35471569[source]▶
Your problem is that Python sucks, especially it's dependency management. It sucks not because it ought to suck, but because of the incompetence of PyPA (the people responsible for packaging).

There are multiple problems with Python packaging which ought not exist, but are there and make lives of Python users worse:

* Python doesn't have a package manager. pip can install packages, but installing packages iteratively will break dependencies of packages installed in previous iterations. So, if you call pip install twice or more, you are likely to end up with a broken system.

* Python cannot deal with different programs wanting different versions of the same dependency.

* Python version iterates very fast. It's even worse for most of the Python packages. To stand still you need to update all the time, because everything goes stale very fast. In addition, this creates too many versions of packages for dependency solvers to process leading to insanely long installation times, which, in turn, prompts the package maintainers to specify very precise version requirements (to reduce the time one has to wait for the solver to figure out what to install), but this, in turn, creates a situation where there are lots of allegedly incompatible packages.

* Python package maintainers have too many elements in support matrix. This leads to quick abandonment of old versions, fragmented support across platforms and versions.

* Python packages are low quality. Many Python programmers don't understand what needs to go into a package, they either put too little or too much or just the wrong stuff altogether.

All of the above could've been solved by better moderation of community-generated packages, stricter rules on package submission process, longer version release cycles, formalizing package requirements across different platforms, creating tools s.a. package manager to aid in this process... PyPA simply doesn't care. That's why it sucks.

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1. zdw ◴[06 Apr 23 17:45 UTC] No.35471800[source]▶
s/Python/NodeJS/ and everything in this statement is multiplied by 10x
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2. IshKebab ◴[06 Apr 23 21:56 UTC] No.35475079[source]▶
Some of it is also true for Node (e.g. poor package quality), but I think it would be hard to argue that the actual package management of Node is anywhere near as bad as Python.

Node basically works fine. You get a huge node_modules folder, sure. But it works.

Python is a complete mess.

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3. zdw ◴[06 Apr 23 22:08 UTC] No.35475204[source]▶
I've tended to have the exact opposite experience - Node projects have 10x (or more) the dependencies of Python ones, and the tooling is far worse and harder to isolate across projects.

A well engineered virtualenv solves most Python problems.

4. nextaccountic ◴[06 Apr 23 22:33 UTC] No.35475438[source]▶
> You get a huge node_modules folder, sure. But it works.

pnpm and other tools deduplicates that

5. crabbone ◴[06 Apr 23 23:44 UTC] No.35476120[source]▶
I don't have enough experience with npm, but one thing I know for sure is that it can support multiple different versions of the same package. Not in the way I'd like it to do that (i.e. it also allows this in the same application), but at least in this sense it's not like Python.