3 ms·

I'm interested in exploring what makes a build tool bad or good. What do you dislike about SBT?

• the_af 10y ago
  Sorry, I didn't see your question before. I don't know if you'll see my answer now, but here is what I dislike about SBT: - It's unclear whether SBT wants you to write build.sbt or build.scala project files. It's recommended you use build.sbt by default, but I've seen plenty of "simple" projects, sometimes examples but often templates generated by tools, which default to build.scala. And now I've read build.scala is deprecated... - The syntax of build.sbt is confusing. Is it Scala? Is it a DSL? Knowing Scala is certainly not enough to understand SBT (even for build.scala files!), but if I remember correctly one of its selling points was that it was "just Scala". - Let's get not started about build files for build files... - The structure of the file is confusing. I never know when defining a key is going to work or not. There seem to be tons of ways of doing something, which is fine in a general-purpose language but undesirable in a configuration format! - The many third-party plugins are confusing to configure and are often poorly documented, which reminds me of Maven's discouraging "plugin hell"... I don't think I've ever seen a plugin for Maven which was adequately documented, which means you end up copying someone else's configuration without fully understanding it. I fear SBT is the same. - Neither IntelliJ nor Scala IDE are entirely happy compiling SBT's project files. Thankfully the support has gotten better, but it's not 100% there yet. This used to be maddening in the recent past; a "compiled" project file which your IDE fails to properly understand is unusable!
  • bshanks 10y ago
    thanks!