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Google building Java build system?

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20 pointsVonGuard7 comments

I think the real question is whether this is project-level (Ant, Maven) or integration/deployment-level (Jenkins, Hudson), or both. Having played around with Maven and Jenkins a lot over the last month or so, I really can't imagine how they'd improve much over them. Jenkins' interface could use a pretty hefty facelift, but functionality-wise they're both rock-solid.

Is this going to be a case of not-invented-here syndrome, or will it really up-end the build and deployment culture like git and mercurial did to subversion? I'm guessing something in between, but we'll see.

I imagine they are trying for simplicity, on the lines of Guice.

I know Google are obsessed with SCons for building other stuff so I get the feeling we're going to get a Java version of Scons.

Scons already supports Java (http://www.scons.org/doc/production/HTML/scons-user/c4348.ht...). But I believe you're right, it will be scriptable out of the box like Gradle. But not python though.

That's kinda weird. Google's source tree is notoriously huge and SCons is notoriously slow at computing dependencies in large projects. I wonder how they make it work.

While maven is very powerful, the minimalist in me wants to see something far more simple and still just as functional. If they can achieve that, I think it would be great.

Maven is just too much, IMO.

Given that Google recently hired the author [1] of a good Python implementation [2] of djb's redo [3], I'm hoping for a build tool along those lines, but in a compiled language. It's probably too much to ask for something that simple though.

[1] http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201103#24

[2] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo

[3] http://cr.yp.to/redo.html

I hope so too, for those times that I cannot avoid Java -- although, following Avery's blog posts and programming style, I would assume that Java is not one of his favourite languages.

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