bach VS Buck

Projects like bach do serve to make the case that, if the resolution/build library piece were filled in, building and maintaining a multi module or multi-whatever project using just javac/jar/etc with Java build programs would be practical.

Have you heard about/looked into bach? It's a build-tool based mostly around pumping the output of one jdk tool into another.

Not quite that, but bach is a build tool trying to simplify that java build process.

Hyper-large tech companies managing hyper-large monorepos using Bazel (google), buck (Facebook), please (thought machine), pants (Twitter, Foursquare & Square) enjoy them but also have a lot of resources devoted to running and maintaining it.

We use Buck company wide. Our packaging / deployment system, for example, expects to be given a Buck target to build, not a pre-built binary - I can’t just build my app with dotnet and upload it. While it is possible for a Buck target to be a simple bash command (i.e dotnet publish), doing so makes the target “opaque” - Buck wouldn’t have any knowledge of my app’s build graph so I’d lose many of the benefits it gives us (incremental cached builds etc.)

Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available:

http://pants.build

https://ninja-build.org

https://buck.build

and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build

I’m feeling sorry for everyone affected.

Let’s hope that this isn’t going to impact Buck [0] too much. It’s one of the best things Facebook has ever made.

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/buck/tree/dev

Pioneered by tech giants like Google and Meta with tools like Bazel and Buck, monorepos are seeing widespread adoption across companies of all sizes and industries.

Buck has a http_file() that you can use this way, and it has first-class support for Java.

That's a good bridge into saying that we don't use pretty much any standard tooling. Our build system is Buck, we use Mercurial instead of Git, and the IDE of choice seems to be Visual Studio (although Android Studio is supported, with some custom plugins required).

Didn't know it was python based. Their github repo shows 90% of the code is java, only 2% is python. Regardless, C++ build systems should be written by people who are familiar with C++ and the specific problems they need to solve. That means the build system should be written in C++ or C and not in java, lua, or python. I certainly do not want to install python just to build my C++ programs in a CI environment, it just increases my build complexity and attack surface

The landing page of https://buck.build/ explains some of the most basic stuff. This Meta Engineering blog post summarizes some of the deeper optimizations possible through buck: https://engineering.fb.com/2017/11/09/android/rethinking-android-app-compilation-with-buck/