alt Hacker NewsNot sure if niche is right word to describe buck2; as I understand it's perfectly good general purpose build system. What it really is missing is just users, so that the ecosystem for it could get bootstrapped.
It's kinda awkward situation with Bazel, buck2 is arguably simply better system but Bazel has an ecosystem. That makes both of them less attractive solutions atm.
Naturally, the ecosystem is a chicken and egg situation; it will not improve unless some brave souls will do some trailblazing. Meta can not be expected to solve this when they have their own custom internal ecosystem which is not really applicable for others.
Google at least at the time had a vested interest in making external blaze a thing AND the options in open source were just "not as good". While buck2 is IMO technically better, I don't think there's a compelling reason to switch and I just don't see Meta having a long-term vested interest in keeping it open and growing it.