The future of Buck | Hacker News Reader

The future of Buck

developers.facebook.com

31 pointsasimpletune18 comments

Why not direct these investments to Bazel instead?

Bazel is by Google. No way Facebook would shift funding to that.

Plus there are a variety of other open source build systems by smaller teams that could benefit from good funding. We don't need two giants dumping money into what is essentially the same build system with different branding, both of which aren't very good anyway.

Bazel is the best out there, in my opinion. It’s not exactly targeted towards the hobbyist, though—more the professional.

I have worked with hundreds of build systems as I'm a bit of a build systems nerd. Bazel is very far from the best. And there's no such thing as a build system "for professionals". That's not a goal of a build system.

Would you be so kind as to share some of your top picks for build systems?

As someone who wants to understand what makes a great build system, I'd very much appreciate it

I think the answer is that contributing to Bazel will not get Facebook devs promoted, but creating something new will.

just because this tool is written in rust does not mean facebook gets a pass for all the atrocities their software and algorithms have caused upon humanity.

This is a losing argument and discounts the brilliant work and engineering happening here.

You can be happy about this project and accomplishment and still dislike the company, its practices, and its leadership.

I strongly dislike Facebook, but this is really cool. I'm fortunate we get nice things like this.

Same with Google.

Dirty money can afford good programmers. But the same programmers are the reason for the heavy tracking in the internet and the FOMO dark patterns.

how has facebook's engineering tools directly and vastly improved the lives of ordinary people?

I really cannot find any examples anywhere of this.

ReactJS, PyTorch.

https://github.com/facebook?q=&type=&language=&sort=stargaze...

> the lives of ordinary people

how was my friends grandpa impacted by this?

clue: developers are not ordinary people

I get your point, but I’m not so sure it’s a losing argument.

Brilliant minds could alternatively be doing equally brilliant things for any other company or organization than Facebook or Google, but instead, they do.

Shall we also marvel at the brilliant work and engineering that went into the development of the atomic bomb?

Perhaps nuclear advances still would have been made if the Manhattan Project had devoted its resources to similar research, but not with the goal of building a weapon.

Perhaps not. But I refuse to celebrate Facebook for what it is, and hope that we don’t need to count on it for engineering advancements.

At least it’s open source: https://github.com/facebook/buck/blob/master/LICENSE

I do agree. Facebook doesn’t get a pass regardless.

Isn't that codebase in Java?

Oh, you're right. The blog says the Rust code won't be ready until next year.

The focus on the implementation in Rust in the blog post is a bit odd. That's largely inconsequential for the customers of the product.

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