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Comment by andreaferretti | Hacker News Reader

I happen to find sbt one of the few build tools (together with lein) that are decent enough. Do you have any particular reason for your dislike?

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It doesn't work with large codebases. Or even very well with medium sized ones.

What size are we talking? I've had no issues with SBT on a 20k line codebase.

I'm using it on a 100k line codebase without issue. What problems are you having?

i'm loving sbt, but still on projects above > 100 dependencies it gets really really slow to download it, while with gradle (even i dislike it) it is way way faster.

This is probably SBT's greatest weakness and Gradle's biggest strength, relatively. I've never run in to this personally, probably because I'm use Nexus[1] as a repository cache. My understanding is that the underlying problem is a limitation of the dependency resolution library they use, Ivy[2]. Gradle used to use this but at some point wrote their own dependency resolution library. There are some improvements in recent versions of SBT but you have do a little configuration. See here[3] for more details.

[1] http://www.sonatype.com/nexus/product-overview

[2] http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

[3] https://www.typesafe.com/blog/improved-dependency-management...

I also thought of introducing Nexus, but since we are only 3 Devlopers (yet, we searching though) it didn't too much sense. I also I hoped for Nexus 3 (but since I'm waiting over half a year now, we might introduce Nexus 2).

Oh and we also using the Cache, when working on newer sbt projects.

> It doesn't work with large codebases.

This type of general conclusion isn't, by itself, particularly useful in discussion; a lot more useful would be presenting a summary of the specific facts and experiences that lead you to this conclusion.

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