In this post, we explain Buck, a powerful build tool, in a way that is very easy to understand (or as it is commonly known online, ELI5). If you’d like to learn by watching or listening, watch a video about this open source project on our Facebook Open Source YouTube channel.
Why Buck?
It is a known fact that managing Android library projects typically requires a number of duplicate manifest and build files. On the Facebook level, maintaining these projects becomes an unmanageable achievement. Imagine having to manually update every single line of code in tens or hundreds of files in your Android project. This redundancy opens up the potential for errors and outdated data. In addition, the repetition makes development tedious and cumbersome, which lowers developer productivity. We created Buck to address these issues.
Buck is a build tool that supports multiple programming languages. Although Buck was originally developed for the Android ecosystem, it now works on many platforms including iOS, .NET, and others. This tool is designed to be a quick iteration that allows developers to quickly compile and execute their changes.
Buck is optimized for incremental builds. This approach means that only files that have changed are recompiled, while other artifacts remain intact. This greatly simplifies the build process as developers only have to recreate what they are currently working on, so you as a developer can be more productive and efficient.
To further enhance the developer experience, Buck allows easy integration with IDEs of your choice, making you and your team more productive.
About the ELI5 series
In a series of short videos (around 1 minute long) one of our developer attorneys on the Facebook Open Source team explains a Facebook Open Source project in a way that is easy to understand and use.
For each of these videos we are writing an accompanying blog post (like the one you are reading right now) that you can find on our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Facebook Open Source, visit our Open Source website, subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Would you like to work with open source on Facebook? Check out our open source related job postings on our careers page by taking this short survey.
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