3 ms·

Well... * It's slow * There's little sense of its overall abstraction (or how the abstractions you find fit together) * Its configuration language is undecip

Well... * It's slow * There's little sense of its overall abstraction (or how the abstractions you find fit together) * Its configuration language is undecipherable (if you want to use operators liberally consider the hoops people who need to search up `<++=` have to go through) * It's hard to work through the documentation. I can't put my finger on it, but I think because the abstraction(s) are hazy it's hard to work out how the documentation fits together * Writing plugins is non-trivial * Speeding up compilation is a non-trivial exercise in futility * It's too clever by half... Did I mention it invokes the compiler on its own project definition? :)

dtech 9y ago
All fairly reasonable critiques, but a few are actively being addressed or have been addressed > if you want to use operators liberally consider the hoops people who need to search up `<++=` have to go through To be fair, the SBT maintainers have realized this for a while and deprecated them all in 2013, and removed them in the 1.0 release from 2017. > Speeding up compilation is a non-trivial exercise in futility Do you mean for the developer? It's more of a critique of scala then of SBT, but incremental compilation has gotten a huge speed up in the new Zinc compiler of SBT 1.0, and Lightbend has started actively benchmarking and improving compiler speeds.
- aphexairlines 9y ago
  The intro docs still mention some custom operators: := in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Basic-Def.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Basic-Def.html / in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Task-Graph.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Task-Graph.html % in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html %% in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html I don't know if they're useful or not, but they're there.
  - vvillena 9y ago
    Some quick explanation: := is the standard SBT assignment operator. You see it everywhere, so its use is clear. / is used for directory traversal. This is not SBT-specific, it comes from the File class in the Scala standard library. This is not as common, but it is sometimes used to setup custom source directories. % and %% are used all the time for declaring dependencies. % is the standard separator, and %% is used to automatically choose the library version compatible with the Scala version used in the project. There is also %%%, used in ScalaJS. You can use only % if you want to, the only thing the other two do is add a suffix to the dependency name. So yeah, useful. Still, they could probably have done without these custom symbols.

dtech 9y ago

All fairly reasonable critiques, but a few are actively being addressed or have been addressed > if you want to use operators liberally consider the hoops people who need to search up `<++=` have to go through To be fair, the SBT maintainers have realized this for a while and deprecated them all in 2013, and removed them in the 1.0 release from 2017. > Speeding up compilation is a non-trivial exercise in futility Do you mean for the developer? It's more of a critique of scala then of SBT, but incremental compilation has gotten a huge speed up in the new Zinc compiler of SBT 1.0, and Lightbend has started actively benchmarking and improving compiler speeds.

aphexairlines 9y ago
The intro docs still mention some custom operators: := in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Basic-Def.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Basic-Def.html / in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Task-Graph.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Task-Graph.html % in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html %% in http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html http://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html I don't know if they're useful or not, but they're there.
- vvillena 9y ago
  Some quick explanation: := is the standard SBT assignment operator. You see it everywhere, so its use is clear. / is used for directory traversal. This is not SBT-specific, it comes from the File class in the Scala standard library. This is not as common, but it is sometimes used to setup custom source directories. % and %% are used all the time for declaring dependencies. % is the standard separator, and %% is used to automatically choose the library version compatible with the Scala version used in the project. There is also %%%, used in ScalaJS. You can use only % if you want to, the only thing the other two do is add a suffix to the dependency name. So yeah, useful. Still, they could probably have done without these custom symbols.