Gradle Is Javamaxxing

ysleepy

Offense is the best defense? Gradle is usually lagging behind, being unable to build projects with the latest JDK a week after it was released because of some asm bytecode dependency bullshit. I have an unreasonable hatred of gradle and its imperative, choose-your-own-language build files, every buildfile being structured differently. Hateful. Not even talking about how slow it is, no I don't want the garbage demon running somewhere.

Postosuchus

Almost 40 years of software engineering experience - and I hate Gradle more than I would consider reasonable. In fact, I consider Gradle the absolute worst software system out there. Absolute majority of people I witnessed using Gradle (myself including) approached it with almost religious terror. Making a change - any change - is akin to playing Russian Roulette, except all chambers but one are loaded. Change one directive - and your build breaks in most weird and incomprehensible ways. And then there is the whole notion of stability (I mean "contract stability.") Almost every single release of Gradle breaks things in some subtle ways. I can take a project from the olden UNIX days with its Makefile and that Makefile will work in gmake in the freshest Linux distro, using gmake release that was produced multiple decades after Stu Feldman's make. It doesn't require a very specific version of libc or kernel. Because it is 1. Written portably and 2. It treats its behavior (jokes about using the Tab character aside) as a contract and it doesn't violate it just because some poorly educated software engineer decided that it would be a good idea to change the behavior in the upcoming release.

microflash

Every single time I experience Gradle, I’m grateful Maven exists.

plmpsu

Gradle is really powerful if you know what you're doing and you take the time and effort to keep your build optimized, sane, and working. I recently built a Gradle plug-in that allows us to build native components on a remote system (z/OS) and integrate these tasks and artifacts with the native Gradle model so that Gradle takes care of caching and parallel task execution. I'm sure this is possible with other build tools as well, though, but the Gradle model fit our use case nicely. I think any complicated build system will eventually devolve regardless of the build tool if it's not properly maintained; the variability of the required tasks is just too high. Gradle does seem to be moving fast with regards to Java support in general changes and improvements in the build tool. It takes effort to keep up, but it's worthwhile.