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Comment by fabioz | Hacker News Reader

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fabioz

The first advantage the homepage lists is:

> Mill can build the same Java codebase 5-10x faster than Maven, or 2-4x faster than Gradle

Speed per se can be a good selling point (having to wait for slow builds is really annoying).

I can't really comment on anything else though as I just stumbled upon it here in HN ;)

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The goal should be more like 50x faster than Gradle. Gradle is ludicrously slow (at least in every single Gradle project I’ve had to work with).

First invocation may be. Subsequent builds are very fast, unless someone decided to write random bullshit into the build scripts that execute at config time, making the config process impure.

I’m mostly thinking of Android projects. If I have time I’ll try some speed tests with a new basic project. But I don’t think I’ve even once done something in Android Studio and thought “huh, that was surprisingly fast”. Maybe some of the hot reloading stuff is okay (when it actually works).

Are we talking about Maven with its cache extension?

https://github.com/apache/maven-build-cache-extension

Because in my experience, this makes Maven very, very fast.

AFAIR author made quite unfair comparison with simple compile vs full maven build (that executes a lot of additional stuff)

For Scala (of which this is probably the main target) Maven builds are especially slow. I would not be surprised if that was his early focus.

Mill's early goal was to be a saner sbt, incidentally also fixing the parts of sbt that are/were unreasonably slow due to questionable design decisions.

Maven has never been relevant to the Scala ecosystem given most of the community has pretty much moved straight from ant to sbt. Only a few Spark related projects stubbornly use Maven, which is a major pain given the lack of cross-building abilities. Slow dependency resolution and inefficient use of Zinc merely add insult to injury.

Yeah... that's my experience with Scala all around - it's abysmally slow, especially if you use any sort of "metaprograming"... (one of the reasons I stay clear of the language)

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