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Why does the Scala community needs its own build tool? Why not just use Gradle? Or if something is missing, adding this to Gradle and then using Gradle.
by cryptos 9y ago
Why does the Scala community needs its own build tool? Why not just use Gradle? Or if something is missing, adding this to Gradle and then using Gradle.
- dtech 9y agoYou can build Scala projects with Ant, Maven and Gradle, but for some reason, a language community often gravitates toward the language-specific tools.
- RX14 9y agoConsidering gradle is heavilly used in Java, kotlin, (and groovy) while it's DSL is in groovy (while the back end is largely Java these days), that's not always true.
- jurip 9y agoIt's possible that back in 2008 Gradle did not seem like an obvious choice (assuming it is now; I have no experience with it.) And after a community has effectively standardised on a tool, switching to something else isn't done lightly.
- cryptos 9y agoBut if SBT is at a point where a (more or less) complete rewrite is discussed, it is probably the time to think about Gradle a second time. Even the new Kotlin DSL should look familiar to Scala devs.
- aphexairlines 9y agoThe Scala community provides Gradle plugins for scala itself (through zinc), scoverage, scalastyle, scalafmt, wartremover, scala protobuf integration, and scala-aware intellij project generation from your build.gradle. It works well.
- vvillena 9y agoSBT ended up winning due to build plugins and cross compilation between multiple Scala versions.
- richdougherty 9y agoI don't think it was a conscious decision to not support Gradle, etc, it's just that sbt had a few highly motivated maintainers. This meant that sbt became the easiest tool to use when starting a Scala project. sbt's incremental compilation was also very important for a language with long compile times and still-developing IDE support. It would be great if Scala had great Gradle support. Nowadays some large Scala users maintain Gradle support for Scala to a good level.
- fmpwizard 9y agoWhen sbt came out, Gradle wasn't as popular, the choices were either Maven or Ant at the time. If you are now starting with Scala, you have more choices.