# Buck2

18 Hacker News commenters recommended Buck2 and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Fast, fine-grained build system from Meta, praised for solving hard build problems. Critics say documentation is poor and it demands adopting everything at once.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster builds than Buck1 (2 comments): "Rust build system, 3-5× faster than Buck1" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991548)) "Buck2 also hugely improved build times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46798796))
- Solves hard build system problems (2 comments): "it's among the very few options that try to solve the hard problems of build systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46044565)) "Buck and Bazel have the right architecture." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800928))
- Fine-grained tracking of changed files (2 comments): "so use Bazel or buck2 if you need an iteration on make's handling of changed files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47172803)) "Bazel/Buck has much finer awareness down to every individual file." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264087))
- Nicer to use than alternatives (2 comments): "Internal buck is actually mostly nice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078225)) "Buck does it a lot nicer, IMHO" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361476))

## What people warn about

- Dislike of Starlark and Python (2 comments): "Buck2 is promising, but I'm not a huge fan of Starlark/Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874253)) "used Python directly and it had lots of issues compared to Starlark" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46044235))
- Big-tech baggage, not usable outside Meta (2 comments): "buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50097153)) "The only real such build systems are Buck and Bazel. But they have way too much baggage from their overlords." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789249))
- Requires adopting everything from day one (2 comments): ""Quickly and easily" are not exactly what comes to mind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941848)) "all force you to adopt everything from day 1" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48043531))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Bazel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bazel.md): 79 recommend
- [GNU Make](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-make.md): 76 recommend
- [CMake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cmake.md): 58 recommend
- [Apache Maven](https://hackerapproved.com/p/maven.md): 44 recommend
- [Ninja build system](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ninja.md): 37 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Buck2", https://hackerapproved.com/p/buck2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).