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Comment by nemith | Hacker News Reader

Also Facebook has a history of releasing the source code for something. Making a huge splash and then essentially doing nothing after 3 months (aka after someone gets their review).

They use the code internally but fail at making sure it has use externally. This is doubly the case for anything infrastructure

Buck2: Was released. Never could be built correctly without the latest nightly of Rust and even then it was fragile outside of Meta's build architecture

Sapling: Has a whole bunch of excitement and backing when it was announced. Has been essentially dead 3 mos after release.

I used to work for Meta infra. I know the MO. Have a hard time trusting.

Astral use-case is external and has a better chance of actually being supported.

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We totally get why you might be skeptical and even address this in our FAQ: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/pyrefly-faq/#how-do-i-know-this-...

We know we can't just ask for trust upfront. Instead, we want to earn it by showing up consistently and following through on our commitments. So, take us for a spin and see how we do over time. We're excited to prove ourselves!

Sapling is actively developed, not "dead after 3 months": https://github.com/facebook/sapling/commits/main/

Have not tried building Buck2 (no personal use for it), but its also actively developed: https://github.com/facebook/buck2/commits/main/

Sorry I didn't mean it's not dead but it really hasn't got as much feature support. Things like LFS support got deproritized just because the internal team asking for it got a different feature.

Both are EXTREMELY active but only for the needs of Meta and not for the community.

Adoption outside of Meta is nearly non-existent because of this.

Look at something like Jujitsu. instead of Sapling and you can see a lot more community support, a lot more focus on features that are needed for everyone (still no LFS support, but it wasn't because Google didn't need it).

I guess I don't consider a larger number of commits as actively supporting the community. The community use is second place and the open source is just a one time boost to recruiting PR.

Is this standard promotion driven development? Or do the people who are trying to open source these products end up being blocked?

When I was there (which was a while ago) almost every decision was based around PSC (Performance Summary Cycle) and it's easy to justify a good rating for a large project being open sourced. Less so to make sure it's well supported for the use cases of the community.

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