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Comment by eeperson | Hacker News Reader

The performance problems are definitely the most annoying part of using Gradle. The Gradle daemon helped a little but tended to break other things and Gradle was still pretty slow.

If you are looking for something faster and more declarative, you may want to check out SBT[0]. It is way faster than any of the other JVM build tools. Also, in the future[1] it should have much better tooling support than anything else on the JVM.

[0] - http://www.scala-sbt.org/ [1] - https://github.com/sbt/sbt/wiki/Client-server-split

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Right now, SBT + IDEA is a bit of a pain because they share the same target folder and IDEA sometimes overwrites/deletes .class files that your application (started via sbt run) hasn't loaded yet. Usually that leads to a few ClassDefNotFound errors and such. Hopefully that'll go away once we have a single SBT instance.

My two wishes for SBT would be: 1) A monadic style for .scala build files. It would make dealing with the immutable bits of project definitions so much more pleasant and we could avoid the weird semi-Scala syntax of .sbt files. And 2) A bottom-up approach similar to Pants. My team frequently end up getting a lot more project interdependencies than we bargain for simply because it's too easy to induce transitive dependencies.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by a monadic style for .scala build files?

PS - You may already know this, but you can change IntelliJ's compile output directory [0].

[0] - http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/configuring-module-com...

Thank you, I haven't actually tried that. I really live the "I just want my IDE to work" philosophy (out of laziness), so I try to avoid configuration if I can. :)

About monadic style: I realize that it's a hard sell, but it's basically about leveraging for comprehensions (aka. do-notation) to specify your build. Shake is an example of this, although probably not particularly suited to building Scala code.

Shake?

Sorry, should've linked[1]. There's also a further link from there to a paper for your reading pleasure :).

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shake

Thanks!

SBT has a terrible habit of breaking backwards compatibility, which has put me off it.

I've never had to change anything between upgrades (aside from changing deprecated stuff). Are you referring to the jump between from 0.7 to 0.10 a few years ago or have you had more recent issues?

Yeah, I just went and had a look at the project in question and I'm being unfair to SBT, it was a plugin I use to package WARs that changed underneath me. The plugin was quite closely coupled to the version of SBT, but the latest variant of it (once I found out about the migration to a different artefact) seems good.

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