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Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

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Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#121

Post by malkia »

thundergolfer wrote: post #38
jpgvm wrote: post #21

Bazel has a heavy focus on correctness (pretty much to the exclusion of everything else). Where does Moon fall on the correctness gradient? Does it enforce hermecity or deterministic builds or give me tools to accomplish it? In the same vein as those questions how does caching work? Is it content based like Bazel or mtime like Nx et al? If there is no sandboxing does it do input tracking or is there manual "cache key…

To be clear, Bazel focuses on correctness because it's essential to acheiving performance at scale. If you don't have correct caching of intermediate build artifacts, a system can't handle the compile and test requirements of large codebases.

that +1000

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#122

Post by eitland »

andrew_ wrote: post #59
lhorie wrote: post #39

IMHO, if you're targeting the Javascript ecosystem, this area is already fairly crowded, with Turborepo, Nx and various open source tools providing various degrees of functionality (Bazel, Pants, Lerna, etc) already competing in the space. I'm a tech lead for the web monorepo at Uber. We talked to the Turborepo guy a few years ago, and he admitted that he wasn't sure if it could handle our scale in terms of all the b…

Nx is hot garbage imo. Buggy, overly verbose, inflexible, poorly documented, and I'm dubious about their peer review process. If I don't need build caching I'm not using any tool but PNPM and its workspace toolset - that's literally all most people need for a monorepo. I've looked into Turborepo, and its simplicity versus Nx is a strength. However, it's not the taskrunner that I want. I now work in a monorepo where b…

That is really interesting.

NX has been on my "to learn" list for a long time and high enough that I have given it a few stabs with personal project but something have failed every single time. I chalked it down to my setup or my inexperience but maybe it just isn't as good as I thought.

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#123

Post by malkia »

andrew_ wrote: post #62
jpgvm wrote: post #21

Bazel has a heavy focus on correctness (pretty much to the exclusion of everything else). Where does Moon fall on the correctness gradient? Does it enforce hermecity or deterministic builds or give me tools to accomplish it? In the same vein as those questions how does caching work? Is it content based like Bazel or mtime like Nx et al? If there is no sandboxing does it do input tracking or is there manual "cache key…

Bazel as a taskrunner/build system is to most monorepos as a Pile Driver [1] is to a floorboard nail. It will do everything but it's massive overkill. We are agreed that Nx doesn't measure up, but I wouldn't compare it to Bazel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver

When you start having 100 applications (a typical game may have that amount), even if only 10 of them are thorouhgly tested, you end up needing that pile driver, or you end up compiling all 100 of these on every presubmit. Just sayin.

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#124

Post by malkia »

gen220 wrote: post #86
mileswjohnson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on everyone's feedback about YAML (we didn't expect this much), we'll probably reconsider this!

Take a look at Apache Aurora [1] if you want some inspiration on how to mold python into a config language. I used this system for a few years and mainly agree with the person you're replying to – having a proper programming language to define config is a very nice feature that I miss. [1]: https://aurora.apache.org/

one of the benefits of starlark (unlike python): "Starlark is suitable for use in highly parallel applications. An application may invoke the Starlark interpreter concurrently from many threads, without the possibility of a data race, because shared data structures become immutable due to freezing." from https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/spec.md - it's not python, you can't do recursion (!) and it's more limited (you can't read a file in bazel, and parse it, you have to make this operation into the graph somehow)

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#127

Post by hamandcheese »

jpgvm wrote: post #21

Bazel has a heavy focus on correctness (pretty much to the exclusion of everything else). Where does Moon fall on the correctness gradient? Does it enforce hermecity or deterministic builds or give me tools to accomplish it? In the same vein as those questions how does caching work? Is it content based like Bazel or mtime like Nx et al? If there is no sandboxing does it do input tracking or is there manual "cache key…

I think it's hilarious to say bazel focuses on correctness when it doesn't ship with any hermetic toolchains by default. Properly setting up hermetic toolchains is poorly documented and left as an exercise to the reader.

I say this as someone who wants to love bazel... I just can't understand why it picks up impure toolchains from the system at all.

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#128

Post by eisbaw »

theamk wrote: post #73
haberman wrote: post #57

> Tasks are defined and run as if you were running them in the terminal; no more abstractions like BUILD files. But abstractions are a good thing! They let you separate a system into layers, so that things programmed at a higher layer don't need to know all the details of the lower layers. It's the way we separate interface from implementation. Let me give an example from Bazel. Suppose you are compiling some C or C+…

Look at https://moonrepo.dev/docs#supported-languages They only fully support Javascript. The complex stuff, like defines, C++ toolchain, dynamic libs, etc.. is all out of scope.

Wow true. Claiming to be a build system yet being limited to JS... Apparently, the legions of JS developers think the web is the only thing that exists today.

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#129

Post by eisbaw »

hamandcheese wrote: post #127
jpgvm wrote: post #21

Bazel has a heavy focus on correctness (pretty much to the exclusion of everything else). Where does Moon fall on the correctness gradient? Does it enforce hermecity or deterministic builds or give me tools to accomplish it? In the same vein as those questions how does caching work? Is it content based like Bazel or mtime like Nx et al? If there is no sandboxing does it do input tracking or is there manual "cache key…

I think it's hilarious to say bazel focuses on correctness when it doesn't ship with any hermetic toolchains by default. Properly setting up hermetic toolchains is poorly documented and left as an exercise to the reader. I say this as someone who wants to love bazel... I just can't understand why it picks up impure toolchains from the system at all.

Bazel plus nix.

Re: Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system

#130

Post by astral303 »

Configuration is code, so the YAML written in your tool is still code, code that developers are consuming and versioning. Making it YAML doesn’t make it not code. Your YAML configuration files are proprietary syntax, it is a proprietary code syntax written in a language (YAML) lacks basic abilities for logic or control flow. In a system of any worthwhile complexity, inevitably custom build logic will have to be expressed, and I can’t imagine it being good when it is being cooked up in a proprietary configuration language based on YAML.

How easy will it be for layers of abstractions to emerge in this system? That’s the ultimate limitation of markup-language-based / configuration-based build systems.

Look up the difference between external DSLs and internal DSLs. The YAML config file is an external DSL. I prefer to express configuration using internal DSLs.

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