7 ms·

Buck: A high-performance build tool for Android

37 points by rohan404 11y ago

vj9 11y ago
Awesome man. 2 minutes saved every build. Its like getting a part of your life back.
stephen 11y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Blaze clones, Buck and Pants, now that Google got around to open sourcing the original (ish?, not sure how much they've forked from Blaze) as Bazel. My naive understanding is that they all share the same basic mental model/approach; has anyone played with all three and can compare/contrast? Would be a great HN submission if so... :-)
wzsddtc 11y ago
The Vine team is using Buck and Gradle side by side to take advantage of both (Buck for dev, Gradle to use with standard Android tools) http://engineering.vine.co/post/117873038742/reducing-build-times-by-adopting-buck http://engineering.vine.co/post/117873038742/reducing-build-...
- rohan404 11y ago
  Did you guys end up integrating Buck into Android Studio or just running it command line?
  - wzsddtc 11y ago
    Running it via command line. Android Studio still uses Gradle.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  Interesting idea, thanks for sharing that post ! Compilation times are seriously affecting my ability to work (and the fact that my startup thinks it is a good idea to provide shitty computers to their engineers does not help at all, my machine freezes during compilations). Unless Google announces something during I/O, we might take the plunge and start converting our buildscripts to Buck.
  - on_and_off 11y ago
    And Google delivered at I/O (or at least promised that a fix is incoming).
V-2 11y ago
Note: Buck works only on Mac OS X and Linux. Windows is not supported - you lost me there
vishnuharidas 11y ago
Gradle's syntax is too hard to understand for a beginner. If you write 'something', you cannot say if that's a method, field, property, task, closure or whatever. And nobody writes a well explained tutorial for that. Either Gradle should make the syntax understandable, or adopt some other JS-based build tools or Buck.
- vorg 11y ago
  That's actually Groovy that Gradle uses for its syntax. And it would be nice if Gradle allowed other scripting languages to be plugged, e.g. Clojure, JRuby, Jython, or Nashorn.
  - vishnuharidas 11y ago
    You said it right, and I would add JavaScript to the list that you suggested. That would make it at least readable.
zserge 11y ago
Finally my android builds are fast enough to not lose the focus waiting for the build to finish! Thank you, guys. I wonder if Buck supports Kotlin, or if not - how hard would it be to add it?

37 points by rohan404 11y ago

vj9 11y ago

Awesome man. 2 minutes saved every build. Its like getting a part of your life back.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Blaze clones, Buck and Pants, now that Google got around to open sourcing the original (ish?, not sure how much they've forked from Blaze) as Bazel. My naive understanding is that they all share the same basic mental model/approach; has anyone played with all three and can compare/contrast? Would be a great HN submission if so... :-)

wzsddtc 11y ago

The Vine team is using Buck and Gradle side by side to take advantage of both (Buck for dev, Gradle to use with standard Android tools) http://engineering.vine.co/post/117873038742/reducing-build-times-by-adopting-buck http://engineering.vine.co/post/117873038742/reducing-build-...

rohan404 11y ago
Did you guys end up integrating Buck into Android Studio or just running it command line?
- wzsddtc 11y ago
  Running it via command line. Android Studio still uses Gradle.
on_and_off 11y ago
Interesting idea, thanks for sharing that post ! Compilation times are seriously affecting my ability to work (and the fact that my startup thinks it is a good idea to provide shitty computers to their engineers does not help at all, my machine freezes during compilations). Unless Google announces something during I/O, we might take the plunge and start converting our buildscripts to Buck.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  And Google delivered at I/O (or at least promised that a fix is incoming).

V-2 11y ago

Note: Buck works only on Mac OS X and Linux. Windows is not supported - you lost me there

vishnuharidas 11y ago

Gradle's syntax is too hard to understand for a beginner. If you write 'something', you cannot say if that's a method, field, property, task, closure or whatever. And nobody writes a well explained tutorial for that. Either Gradle should make the syntax understandable, or adopt some other JS-based build tools or Buck.

vorg 11y ago
That's actually Groovy that Gradle uses for its syntax. And it would be nice if Gradle allowed other scripting languages to be plugged, e.g. Clojure, JRuby, Jython, or Nashorn.
- vishnuharidas 11y ago
  You said it right, and I would add JavaScript to the list that you suggested. That would make it at least readable.

zserge 11y ago

Finally my android builds are fast enough to not lose the focus waiting for the build to finish! Thank you, guys. I wonder if Buck supports Kotlin, or if not - how hard would it be to add it?