Mill: Better Scala Builds

Note that while Mill's first target is Scala builds (as an alternative to SBT) there isn't much reason why Mill shouldn't be usable for other JVM/non-JVM languages too.

Mill's core is basically a dependency-graph-based caching task-runner, similar to Bazel, which happens to be written in Scala (rather than Skylark). Scala+Java support is just a bunch of helper methods built on top of that.

It should be pretty trivial to make it work for Java-only projects (https://github.com/lihaoyi/mill/issues/145) or write the necessary helper methods to make it work for other languages or platforms.

I tried to migrate an pretty complex sbt build to mill this week and I can say I'm not disappointed.

The developer experience is so delightful compared to the other build system in the JVM land. And the task model seems just right.

Looks really good - excited to try it!

Generally before adopting a language for a new project, (for me) it would need to have things like:

- good build tool including dependency management - reasonably fast compiler - decent standard library - pretty good IDE support - clear policy about backwards compatibility - good REPL - good documentation (including contribution policy and license)

But there are surprisingly few language ecosystems that have all these fundamental features, even after many years (decades) of development! And many others seem to not appreciate how important they are, leading to years of tepid adoption or only niche usage at best.

Does anyone have any code examples / GitHub repos of Spark projects that are setup with Mill? I've been fighting with build.sbt files for a couple of years and am ready to try out some alternatives.

This looks great.

One of the barriers to switching to this, for my project, is the sbt-native-packager plugin and the way we use it to build debian packages. This plugin is one of the best things about sbt.

I've developed a grudging respect for SBT. It's a petty remarkable project and I don't want to disrespect the people who work in it in any way.

That said, I've been writing Scala for years now and still struggle to modify my builds. And for my team, SBT is a major barrier to entry for people new to Scala.

Once I feel like I can port my build over, I'm going to give Mill a try.

I have some SBT-specific stuff on some projects that is going to slow me down in trying this (namely multiple sbt-web plugins and Play plugin). However, I might have some runway to contribute some ports of these things.

Looks awesome and I am an SBT guy

We don't need better builds for scala. We already have a better scala: Kotlin.

SBT - Sucks Big Time | AcronymFinder (https://www.acronymfinder.com/Sucks-Big-Time-(SBT).html)

After 10years of Scala development, SBT is still the largest pain. Compile speed, picking up changes takes many seconds, arcane syntax, magic error messages, fragile configuration files.

Will try mill, I wonder why no other build tools for scala showed up, with SBT being such a pain for many people.