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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't even put C# in there - minute builds are like nothing unusual, and my only experience with Java is Android but that was really bad too.

They aren't C++ levels bad, but they are slow enough to be distracting/flow breaking. Something like dart/flutter or even TS and frontend with hot reload is much leaner. Comparing to fully dynamic languages is kind of unfair in that regard.

I did not try Go yet but from what I've read (and also seeing the language design philosophy) I suspect it's faster than C#/Java.

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Go is slower than Java (Java's (JIT) optimising compiler and GCs are much more advanced than Go's).

That's runtime performance, I'm taking about compile times.

About the same if you compile many java files with a single run of the compiler.

Android used to have lighting-fast builds even when accounting for Google's quirky tooling, R.java generation and binary XML processing. After introduction of Gradle build system and Kotlin Android build times have become laughingstock of entire programming world.

This however has nothing to do with Java — Kotlin compiler is written Kotlin, and Gradle is written in unholy mix of Kotlin, Java and Groovy (with later being especially notorious for being slow).

Right, the work I get paid to do is often C# and literally yesterday I was cursing a slow C# build. Why is it slow? Did one of the other engineers screw up something about the build, maybe use a feature that's known to take longer to compile, or whatever? I don't know or care.

This idea that it's all sunshine and lollipops for other languages is wrong.

The fun of tracking down slow autoconf builds with spaghetti Makefiles in C, that take a full hour to do a clean build.

Lets not mix build tools with compilers.

Android is an anti-pattern in Java world, and having a build system based on a relatively slow scripting language hardly helps.

Many things that Google uses to sell Java (the language) over Kotlin also steems from how bad they approach the whole infrastructure.

Try using Java on Eclipse with compilation on save.

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