Why Move from Gradle to Maven • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Move from Gradle to Maven

#41

Post by AtlasBarfed » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

Gradle: Inexcusable API churn and arguably worse spaghetti builds than Ant ever had, with loads of undocumented "magic".

Maven: BACK TO XML? Awful. Maven's common directory structure is about the only positive it brought, and I still wince at "src/main". They should have flattened more. Also the pedantic "coordinates" or "artifacts". These are jar names and versions, people, not some cyber virtual reality.

Maven, while it did push forward on pulling dependencies from repositories, didn't separate the dependency download from the code build, so build reproducibility became dependent on the repository access/status/completeness.

Re: Why Move from Gradle to Maven

#42

Post by michaelcampbell » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #12

michaelcampbell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Groovy (and Kotlin, though I know it less), but what bugs me about Gradle is, at least when I last used it which to be fair is some years, is that it solves 50% out of the box. Maven was closer to 85%. The Gradle manual started with, "here's how you write your own tasks!" I don't want to write my own; I want to know how if I need to, but you're saying I need to right off the bat. Maybe that was…

You make it sound as if writing a task was like writing a plugin. That might sound very close to the truth if you look at it through maven goggles, but if you take a step back to the structured shell scripting of makefiles it's hardly surprising they start with that. For me, my main gripes with gradle are that freshness determination is quite difficult to analyze (and quite easy to break when you start doing nontrivi…

> You make it sound as if writing a task was like writing a plugin.

In that you have to write something, it is. Which is my point. I had a very vanilla product; I couldn't do it with vanilla Gradle. I also couldn't find in the documentation how to do "normal stuff"; or at least it wasn't early. It started RIGHT OFF with "here's how you customize it!"

No, start with the 80%, deep dive into deeper stuff, later.

Re: Why Move from Gradle to Maven

#43

Post by throwaway189262 » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #30

throwaway189262 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a 100k LoC project that builds in 15 seconds in maven and that includes packaging everything into an Uber jar. Do you have a fast SSD? It makes an enormous difference in build times

I have an old Western Digital Blue hard drive. My setup is really old. It is about >5 years old.

That's why your builds are slow I guarantee it. Our build times dropped from ~4 minutes to ~20 seconds when they got everyone machines with SSD

Re: Why Move from Gradle to Maven

#44

Post by johnisgood » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 6:20 AM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #38

johnisgood wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could possibly be wrong with the setup though that would cause it? I have a couple of dependencies, including libGDX , artemis-odb , and kotlin-stdlib-jdk8 . I posted it in another comment, but I am willing to record it when my time allows. It is quite baffling. I never encountered such slow compilation times even though I compiled some C++ projects before.

Nit: you don't need to specify kotlin stdlib since Kotlin 1.4

Thank you!