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Buck2: Our open source build system

(engineering.fb.com)
392 points mfiguiere | 1 comments | 06 Apr 23 16:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.256s | source
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oggy ◴[06 Apr 23 19:00 UTC] No.35472845[source]▶
Great to see this. I hope it takes off - Bazel is useful but I really like the principled approach behind it (see the Build Systems a la Carte paper), and Neil is scarily good from my experience of working with him so I'd expect that they've come up with something awesome.

One thing I find annoying with all of these general, language-agnostic build systems though is that they break the "citizenship" in the corresponding language. So while you can usually relatively easily build a Rust project that uses crates.io dependencies, or a Python project with PyPi dependencies, it seems hard to make a library built using Bazel/Buck available to non-Bazel/Buck users (i.e., build something available on crates.io or PyPi). Does anyone know of any tools or approaches that can help with that?

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kccqzy ◴[06 Apr 23 21:10 UTC] No.35474513[source]▶
I have a lot of respect for Neil, but I've been burned by the incompleteness and lack of surrounding ecosystem for his original build system Shake (https://shakebuild.com/). This was in a team where everyone knows Haskell.

I'm cautiously optimistic with this latest work. I'm glad at least this isn't some unsupported personal project but something official from Meta.

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1. ndmitchell ◴[07 Apr 23 14:19 UTC] No.35481833[source]▶
I think of Shake as a library for implementing build systems, and was hoping that libraries would emerge that described how to implement rules like C++, and how they should compose together so you can compile C++/Haskell/Python all together happily. A few libraries emerged, but the overall design never emerged. Sorry you got burned :(

Buck2 is at a higher level than Shake - the rules/providers concepts pretty much force you into a pattern of composable rules. The fact that Meta has lots of languages, and that we were able to release those rules, hopefully means it's starting from the point of view of a working ecosystem. Writing those rules took a phenomenal amount of effort from a huge range of experts, so perhaps it was naive that Shake could ever get there on only open source volunteer effort.