[ahslian]

(Note: I work at Meta, on the buck team)

This isn't really just a FAANG thing. I've seen this throughout my career before the FAANGs at much smaller places, but projects needing multi-platform/multi-language/multi-arch scenarios.

You do have a point, that the issue is that one shouldn't have to learn the depths of a build system to do what one needs. The trade off is how are the knobs exposed to a developer.

Another way to think about it, these domain specific languages like Starlark and otherwise are just where the knobs are being stored. As much as Visual Studio ends up writing these to vsproj/vcproj or msbuild files, it's just that these are stored in another form.

[phendrenad2]

To clarify, I don't think that complex build systems are only used at FAANGs, I think that their usefulness is only realized at FAANGs. From what I've seen at smaller companies, most people are using these tools because everyone else does, not because their software production suffers from the kinds of problems that these tools solve. These tools also seem to provide the mental framework that people need to think about their software production processes, so I guess there's that.