Buck: A high-performance build tool for Android

[stephen]

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]

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-...

[on_and_off]

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.

[rohan404]

Did you guys end up integrating Buck into Android Studio or just running it command line?

[vishnuharidas]

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]

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.

[V-2]

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

[zserge]

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?

[vj9]

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