I've managed to make something that's actually makes Gradle seem pretty impressive, I think mostly by accident. I recently refactored Marginalia's code base to a modular arrangement, and to my surprise Gradle actually does an extremely good job at dealing with this. It actually looks like a competent tool for the job. This is a great surprise for anyone who has worked with Gradle before.
Once I got it all set up, each sub module has a fairly clean gradle file that is low in boiler plate and mostly just specifies dependencies and build artifacts. I can specify versions for the entire codebase in a single file, dependency management is very straight forward and it's stupidly fast do incremental re-builds. There are cases where I can not only re-compile but it will also in some circumstances run the pertinent tests all in less than a second.
That said, to be honest it's still very confusing and I still don't understand how the hell Groovy works with it's looks-declarative-but-really-isn't code style.
Although this is the first time I think I've begun to glimpse why Gradle exists other than to torment developers with API incompatibilities upon each (mandatory) upgrade to keep it working with the newest JVM. It's the first time I've felt the tool brought some sort of value to the code base.
But then again you are the Swede that for a long time ran an advanced, publicly available search engine out of your living room as a side project while working full time.
Of course you can get Gradle to work :-)
Also even considering the above I'd say you were a bit lucky in that you could set up everything yourself, instead of having 11 different people on 7 different teams do it for you ;-)
> That said, to be honest it's still very confusing and I still don't understand how the hell Groovy works with it's looks-declarative-but-really-isn't code style.
How?? It's exactly the same as the Groovy syntax in almost every way, specially the nested blocks which makes Groovy look declarative and that Kotlin inherited from Groovy.
I've managed to make something that's actually makes Gradle seem pretty impressive, I think mostly by accident. I recently refactored Marginalia's code base to a modular arrangement, and to my surprise Gradle actually does an extremely good job at dealing with this. It actually looks like a competent tool for the job. This is a great surprise for anyone who has worked with Gradle before.
Once I got it all set up, each sub module has a fairly clean gradle file that is low in boiler plate and mostly just specifies dependencies and build artifacts. I can specify versions for the entire codebase in a single file, dependency management is very straight forward and it's stupidly fast do incremental re-builds. There are cases where I can not only re-compile but it will also in some circumstances run the pertinent tests all in less than a second.
That said, to be honest it's still very confusing and I still don't understand how the hell Groovy works with it's looks-declarative-but-really-isn't code style.
Although this is the first time I think I've begun to glimpse why Gradle exists other than to torment developers with API incompatibilities upon each (mandatory) upgrade to keep it working with the newest JVM. It's the first time I've felt the tool brought some sort of value to the code base.
e.g.
https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...
https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...