Buck VS cockroach

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/

CockroachDB is an open source distributed SQL database designed for scalability and resilience. While it offers SQL databases, CockroachDB is also compatible with PostgreSQL.

cockroachdb might be close: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

CockroachDB - SQL

For example, when you create a serverless postgres database with a platform like CockroachDB or Neon, you effectively get a connection string with a strong password. Anyone can connect to your database from anywhere so long as they have the right connection string. There are no security settings in these services to change this behavior.

> Yes you can on the android emulator. The biggest issue is compu arch in that case.

I can also download VirtualBox and run all Windows programs, that would mean that all Windows apps are Linux apps?

> Yes you can for the most part

You can't statically link glibc: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/3392

glibc can break stuff: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/08/valve-dev-understandab...

I had binaries break because the newer version if openssl was put under a slightly different name.

Also, worth noting, if you're already using PostgreSQL (or plan to) you might want to take a look at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ they have a free tier too and CockroachDB has a PostgreSQL interface.

I know that some projects like cockroach use custom build tools like bazel. But we actually really like to use to be able to build our projects simply with the great go toolchain and don't really aim to dive deep into custom build solutions.

CockroachDB is designed to be globally distributed. It has to handle causality when resolving collisions. It has to account for having a write operation to arrive after another and still have time priority because it was sent out a few milliseconds earlier.

Cockroachdb created a go runtime patch which measures the Grunning time of a goroutine: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/82356. It doesn't entirely solve the problem though.

Our entire backend is written in Go. We've built a platform that allows other companies to offer automatic data syncing to their customers' data warehouses. Go works great for building distributed systems like this (see K8s). We're not the only ones in the space building data intensive applications with Go. Pachyderm, Pinecone, Cockroach Labs and are all also doing it. We've been quite happy with how Go has worked for us.