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I've tried Gradle again and again only to go back to Maven. Gradle is painfully slow on large (and even small) builds. It's backward compatibility story is non-existent. You can pick any two build files and chances are that they are completely different when compared. Groovy dialect has poor autocompletion support.

Maven, on the other hand, has been extremely fast (with or without caching). I've been upgrading Maven for a long time and have yet to see an upgrade that breaks the build. I can pick any two POM files and chances are they are almost identical. XML, for all it's deficiencies, absolutely flies when it comes to autocompletion.

My experience has been same from small projects to large multi-module projects.



Gradle is much faster than maven, as it supports parallel builds, has much smarter caching/evaluation strategies, etc.

You just likely have tasks run at configuration time (you don’t use doFirst/doLast in custom tasks), or some other problematic build files.


This reinforces my opinion about Gradle: there are too many footguns and papercuts. Every time I shot myself in foot using Gradle, some Gradle expert would chime in that I'm probably not using some (poorly documented) way of doing things that would have drastically improved my experience.

This becomes even more problematic in large teams where we have a mix of experienced and novice engineers. Onboarding new people and maintaining the cognitive load about the build using Maven is several magnitudes faster and predictable than with Gradle.


By requiring an always running background daemon to actually make it fast.


No, gradle is fast in CICD settings as well where daemons are meaningless. It is fast because it has a proper graph model that only updates nodes that need to be updated, and can often do so in parallel.


Not faster than Maven, that doesn't depend on a slow scripting language, the reason the daemon was created in first place.


You are fantastically ignorant on this topic, even though I generally find your comments informative..

You can’t possibly believe that the configuration file itself takes any significant percentage of running a full build?


I have fantastically lost my patience with Gradle builds that is why.

I bet if it wasn't for Android, no one would care about Gradle, Google is basically funding its existence.

There are hardly any talks about optmizing Maven builds, with Gradle on the other hand, not only it comes regularly, there is even tooling to track down build performance issues and regular conference talks on the matter.




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