Buck2
Hacker ApprovedRanked 7 of 17 build systems by recommenders
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.
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.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 18
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 18 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Faster builds than Buck1
“Rust build system, 3-5× faster than Buck1”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Meta Segment Anything Model 3” “Buck2 also hugely improved build times.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp” Solves hard build system problems
“it's among the very few options that try to solve the hard problems of build systems”
Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Migrating to Bazel symbolic macros” “Buck and Bazel have the right architecture.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “Zig: All Package Management Functionality Moved from Compiler to Build System” Fine-grained tracking of changed files
“so use Bazel or buck2 if you need an iteration on make's handling of changed files”
Comment from 26 Feb 2026 in “BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything” “Bazel/Buck has much finer awareness down to every individual file.”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments” Nicer to use than alternatives
“Internal buck is actually mostly nice.”
Comment from 28 Jul 2026 in “C/C++ projects packaged for Zig” “Buck does it a lot nicer, IMHO”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Dislike of Starlark and Python
“Buck2 is promising, but I'm not a huge fan of Starlark/Python.”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “Shake Build System” “used Python directly and it had lots of issues compared to Starlark”
Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Migrating to Bazel symbolic macros” Big-tech baggage, not usable outside Meta
“buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke” “The only real such build systems are Buck and Bazel. But they have way too much baggage from their overlords.”
Comment from 4 Jul 2026 in “Zig: All Package Management Functionality Moved from Compiler to Build System” Requires adopting everything from day one
“"Quickly and easily" are not exactly what comes to mind.”
Comment from 16 Nov 2025 in “Go's Sweet 16” “all force you to adopt everything from day 1”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Going Full Time on Open Source”
Other build systems people recommend
The four most recommended other build systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bazel | 79 | 41 | 66% | 12 | 3 yrs3 owners | — |
| GNU Make | 76 | 42 | 64% | 12 | — | — |
| CMake | 58 | 93 | 38% | 12 | — | — |
| Apache Maven | 44 | 42 | 51% | 12 | — | — |
| Buck2This page | 18 | 3 | 86% | 8 | — | Approved |
What people said
All 25 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta”
“Buck2 allows us to create models for these concepts”
“moving from a rust-centric system like Cargo to something more general like buck2”
“Internal buck is actually mostly nice.”
“an elite `bazel` or `buck2` RBE with `nativelink`”
“this heinous zero documentation, high pain tolerance thing”
“Buck and Bazel have the right architecture.”
“The only real such build systems are Buck and Bazel. But they have way too much baggage from their overlords.”
“all force you to adopt everything from day 1”
“so use Bazel or buck2 if you need an iteration on make's handling of changed files”
“Buck2 also hugely improved build times.”
“starting with Bazel/Buck/whatever your poison of choice is almost always a good move”
“Buck2 worked out of the box exactly as claimed”
“Buck does it a lot nicer, IMHO”
“Big tech with monorepos solve this cognitive effort using a unified build system (blaze, buck, buck2).”
“Bazel/Buck has much finer awareness down to every individual file.”
“The state of the art is buck/bazel/nix/build2.”
“it's among the very few options that try to solve the hard problems of build systems”
“used Python directly and it had lots of issues compared to Starlark”
“Rust build system, 3-5× faster than Buck1”
“"Quickly and easily" are not exactly what comes to mind.”
“I like Facebook's BUCK too but it's basically the same thing.”
“Buck2 is promising, but I'm not a huge fan of Starlark/Python.”
“I'll be more open to when either projects seeking to integrate rust utilize tools such as buck”
“Bazel and Buck2 both work well with it, relatively.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.