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392 points mfiguiere | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.289s | source
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bogwog ◴[] No.35471515[source]
I feel so lucky that I found waf[1] a few years ago. It just... solves everything. Build systems are notoriously difficult to get right, but waf is about as close to perfect as you can get. Even when it doesn't do something you need, or it does things in a way that doesn't work for you, the amount of work needed to extend/modify/optimize it to your project's needs is tiny (minus the learning curve ofc, but the core is <10k lines of Python with zero dependencies), and doesn't require you to maintain a fork or anything like that.

The fact that the Buck team felt they had to do a from scratch rewrite to build the features they needed just goes to show how hard it is to design something robust in this area.

If there are any people in the Buck team here, I would be curious to hear if you all happened to evaluate waf before choosing to build Buck? I know FB's scale makes their needs unique, but at least at a surface level, it doesn't seem like Buck offers anything that couldn't have been implemented easily in waf. Adding Starlark, optimizing performance, implementing remote task execution, adding fancy console output, implementing hermetic builds, supporting any language, etc...

[1]: https://waf.io/

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1. PaulDavisThe1st ◴[] No.35473733[source]
And the best part about waf? The explicit design intent that you include the build system with the source code. This gets rid of all the problems with build systems becoming backwards/forwards incompatible, and trying to deal with the issues when a developer works on one project using build system v3.9 and another that users build system v4.6

With waf, the build system is trivially included in the source, and so your project always uses the right version of waf for itself.