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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Android is the only reason I put up with Gradle, for anything else Java related, I turn to Maven and happily forget that Gradle even exists.

It is Ant all over again, with Groovy slowness and game rig hardware requirements to perform in a sane way. There is hardly any Android conference without build related performance improvement talks.

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Maybe this is a dumb question but I thought gradle kts was released a while ago. Why does everyone in this thread still complains about groovy? Could they not just use kotlin?

It's not an easy switch. Still most of the examples and articles are in Groovy. Until recently, IDE (IntelliJ) support for Gradle Kotlin DSL was abysmal (like analysing stuff on the main thread). Only recently it's getting more traction as the worst issues have been resolved.

Because it still is work in progress.

> There is hardly any Android conference without build related performance improvement talks.

fwiw I think the Android toolchain being slow doesn't help. On the same conferences someone will also speak about how the new Android Gradle Plugin is X% faster, so it's not all Gradle's fault :) That said there's plenty more Gradle can do (and is doing) to improve performance. The startup cost to configure all tasks is definitely high on my annoyances list

Gradle was the excuse ant writers/maintainers wanted not to migrate to Maven, because the latter forces you to be cleaner with your project organization.

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