There is only one reason to use Gradle, the poor souls that have to put up with Android development requirements, and have fun with updating their projects, every single time there are DSL changes.
As someone who uses gradle largely out of inertia, I'm curious what you would pick as a better alternative.
Maven as always.
I don't suffer from XML allergy, and Gradle is Ant all over again.
Worse, because it relies on a slow scripting language, or having to go through Kotlin, plus a background deamon.
I'm by-and-large fine with XML, having used it for many a year; however I really like working with XML when I can use Guile's SXML layer. For Maven it's not that important because POMs are simple enough, but for more complex things it's nice having a useful tool.
I actually don't mind Ant very much, but I haven't had good luck using Ivy for dependency management. Maven's been very nice in the decade and a half I've used it, Gradle's always felt off to me. I think there was also another Java build tool written in like Ruby or something, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment.
Before Maven came to be, we had built nice macros on our Ant builds that were quite similar to how Maven works, but Ivy wasn't also around.
Eventually Maven grew on me, however I would rather go back to Ant than deal with Gradle, the time using it when I did Android development a few years ago, was more than enough.
And for those that are allergic Maven 4 will offer alternative file types via extensions!
Is it too late to stop that happening? Nobody wants maven + yaml or whatever else they will add. XML is the correct format.
Idk I think it’s pretty good for the sheer fact that it takes away most arguments against maven. Almost ever argument is hurr durr xml bad.
Re:Gradle Is Javamaxxing
by blandflakes on Thursday May 28, 2026 @05:05PM
(#48315465)
Yeah I have long felt that if we think we need gradle, we should consider doing less crazy stuff in our build. Maven is plenty and any time I get back to a repo that has that instead of gradle or sbt I’m much happier.
Sbt is by far the worst. It’s the bane of my existence.
I have an unreasonable hatred of gradle and its imperative, choose-your-own-language build files, every buildfile being structured differently.
Hateful.
Not even talking about how slow it is, no I don't want the garbage demon running somewhere.