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Without getting into any specifics of it - I'm sure there's people with much more experience with these tools who can comment - I'll point out that neither buck

by wk_end 2y ago

Without getting into any specifics of it - I'm sure there's people with much more experience with these tools who can comment - I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. JS does have a bit of a NIH culture, but I'm not sure if that was really at play here. There just...weren't very many good build tools available at the time, particularly for a company using an unorthodox tech stack.

zokier 2y ago
> I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. But Dune started (according to this blog post) in 2016 and JS started seriously improving and adopting it last year. So to me Jenga sounds like a reasonable step in 2012, but pouring significant effort into migrating from Jenga to Dune (and improving Dune) in 2024 sounds more weird
- yawaramin 2y ago
  Jenga and dune are the same thing, it was just renamed.
  - zokier 2y ago
    The blog post clearly describes them as two different systems, and how Jane Street migrated from one to another.
    - wk_end 2y ago
      Yes and no. This is all spelled out in the post, but it's a little thorny. Dune is a rename of Jbuilder (2016). Jbuilder uses Jenga (2012) configuration files. > By 2016 we had had enough of this, and decided to make a simple cross-platform tool, called Jbuilder, that would allow external users to build our code without having to adopt Jenga in full, and would release us from the obligation of rewriting our builds in OCamlbuild [...] Jbuilder understood the jbuild files that Jenga used for build configuration. So in 2012 it made sense for them to build Jenga, because there weren't any good alternatives - Bzl etc. didn't exist, so they couldn't have solved their problems. And in 2016 they had open-source code they wanted others to be able build; those people didn't want to use Jenga, and JS didn't want to rewrite their builds so that they could use something else. Thus, Jbuilder was a shim so that JS could still use their Jenga builds and others could build JS' code without using Jenga. Bzl etc., even though they existed, wouldn't have solved these problems either.
    - yawaramin 2y ago
      My bad, dune is a rename of jbuilder indeed. Not Jenga. But the other reply provides more context that's important.

by wk_end 2y ago

zokier 2y ago

> I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. But Dune started (according to this blog post) in 2016 and JS started seriously improving and adopting it last year. So to me Jenga sounds like a reasonable step in 2012, but pouring significant effort into migrating from Jenga to Dune (and improving Dune) in 2024 sounds more weird

yawaramin 2y ago
Jenga and dune are the same thing, it was just renamed.
- zokier 2y ago
  The blog post clearly describes them as two different systems, and how Jane Street migrated from one to another.
  - wk_end 2y ago
    Yes and no. This is all spelled out in the post, but it's a little thorny. Dune is a rename of Jbuilder (2016). Jbuilder uses Jenga (2012) configuration files. > By 2016 we had had enough of this, and decided to make a simple cross-platform tool, called Jbuilder, that would allow external users to build our code without having to adopt Jenga in full, and would release us from the obligation of rewriting our builds in OCamlbuild [...] Jbuilder understood the jbuild files that Jenga used for build configuration. So in 2012 it made sense for them to build Jenga, because there weren't any good alternatives - Bzl etc. didn't exist, so they couldn't have solved their problems. And in 2016 they had open-source code they wanted others to be able build; those people didn't want to use Jenga, and JS didn't want to rewrite their builds so that they could use something else. Thus, Jbuilder was a shim so that JS could still use their Jenga builds and others could build JS' code without using Jenga. Bzl etc., even though they existed, wouldn't have solved these problems either.
  - yawaramin 2y ago
    My bad, dune is a rename of jbuilder indeed. Not Jenga. But the other reply provides more context that's important.