Buck VS Gradle

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/

A ("shared") build service is kind of like a singleton, in that when you register one in any project, it's available in all projects as a single instance. (This unfortunately turns out not to be true, in some cases, when using composite builds, but can be worked around.) An actual singleton (global static instance) doesn't work at all, for the record—try it if you want to lose some sanity. Anyway, use a build service whenever you need global mutable state in your build.

When using build tools like Maven or Gradle, you can configure environment variables in the build scripts or configuration files.

For large projects, purpose-made build tools such as Gradle and Maven are preferred for managing the directory structure since they introduce additional semantics for managing test code and other programming languages (among lots of other things). Most IDEs can integrate with these build tools easily. If you're just starting out though, I wouldn't worry too much about these, you can visit them later.

Project Build and Management: Apache Maven 3 (3.9.5), Gradle 8 (8.3)

No wonder this had been raised previously, https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/15383

Ktor, a powerful web framework built with Kotlin, offers a lightweight and flexible solution for building web applications. In this article, we will guide you through the process of creating a Ktor project manually using Gradle and SDKMAN!. By following the steps below, you'll have a basic Ktor project up and running in no time.

The details regarding the code compiling would vary from one project to another. For that project, it seems that it uses Gradle (a helper tool) for compiling. Check Gradle's documentation for more information.

At the moment, Java 20 is the latest version, but Java 17 is the latest LTS release. It's usually best to use an LTS release, because the latest releases won't be widely supported. And that's true of Gradle too. You're using Gradle 8.0, but not even the latest version of Gradle (8.2) fully supports Java 20. You'll have to wait for Gradle 8.3 to use Java 20.