English Translation: Facebook, compiled by ImportNew - Huang Xiaofei
Facebook has introduced an Android build tool called Buck. This tool is capable of integrating the code and resources of an Android project into clean, highly reusable functional modules.
Buck's Features:
Buck helps developers achieve the following goals:
The improvement in build speed is undoubtedly Buck's main advantage. At Facebook, the project team found that using Buck for builds was twice as fast as using Ant scripts. Facebook continues to work on making Buck even faster.
How Buck Works:
In Buck, there are three key concepts:
Each build rule can produce zero or more dependencies (referred to as deps). These dependencies form a directed graph, and Buck requires this graph to be acyclic.
When building output files using build rules, all associated dependencies of the build rules are compiled first. This means that the graph structure mentioned above is built from the bottom up. Build rules only care about what a particular element depends on, not who depends on it. This approach is precisely why a directed graph data structure is used. This data structure allows Buck to effectively identify dependency subgraphs and perform builds in parallel. It also enables Buck to determine which resources need to be built and which have already been built, avoiding redundant builds, thus identifying the minimal build set and improving build efficiency.
Is Buck Useful for Me?
Buck was designed to provide multi-point delivery capabilities based on a single codebase (rather than multiple codebases for multi-point delivery). Based on Facebook's project experience, using a single codebase makes dependency management much easier. This ensures that all developers working on the project share a unified and correct set of dependencies, and simplifies the process of atomic commits.
If you are building multiple applications or developing a finished product using multiple application examples, then Buck is definitely suitable for you. By checking out the QuickStart guide, you can learn how Buck can help you organize your Android projects and build them faster!