Why is Gradle so bad?

Posted by nekudotayim on Monday December 04, 2023 @09:14PM
from the self-post dept.

There's plenty of posts on the problems of Gradle [1][2 etc] - it's undiscoverable, undebuggable, and the documentation tells you everything except how to actually solve your problem. Why is it still the standard JVM build tool? Kotlin is a wonderful high-level server language, I just can't get past how hard it is to set up - and no, RTFM hasn't helped me in the slightest.

Trying to understand if there's room/need for improvement here, not start a flame war. I've tried Maven once upon a time and that had its own problems.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35709521 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801986

( 7 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by I_Am_Nous on Monday December 04, 2023 @09:34PM (#38526339)

My only experience with Gradle was negative, but that's probably because I'm not a Java dev (or any dev, to be frank) but I was trying to set up a server to play Agrarian Skies classic and couldn't find a compatible bukkit server jar and made the mistake of trying to compile it myself. It just kept breaking and not working. I think it was a Gradle 1.8 project so it was also ancient lol

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by 999900000999 on Monday December 04, 2023 @09:43PM (#38526434)

That's why we have Docker now

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by DemocracyFTW2 on Monday December 04, 2023 @11:04PM (#38526974)

so—just don't use it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by nekudotayim on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @07:16PM (#38551275)

Stack overflow dev survey says docker is far and away more popular, but that doesn't absolve the need to build your binaries...I'm just surprised given kotlin's usage in android.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by djaouen on Monday December 04, 2023 @10:01PM (#38526575)

It’s Java. What did you expect it to be? Good???

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by dang on Monday December 04, 2023 @11:42PM (#38527180)

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Gradle so bad? by djaouen on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @01:42AM (#38527804)

I'm sorry. I plan on doing better in the future. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]