> I came to Gradle with the definition in my head that a build tool is a thing that tracks dependencies so that it only has to rebuild things whose inputs have

> I came to Gradle with the definition in my head that a build tool is a thing that tracks dependencies so that it only has to rebuild things whose inputs have changed. Gradle doesn't do that at all. Many hours of searching for how Gradle detects changes were fruitless, because it doesn't even try, really. Gradle basically always runs everything, which is why it's so goddamn slow. Gradle has build cache since version 3.5 [0]. You probably mean the configuration phase for which caching was introduced in version 6.6. [1] Gradle has been consistently improving the last couple of years. I’m quite happy with its speed since the v6.5 upgrade. 0 - https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/build_cache.html https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/build_cache.html 1 - https://docs.gradle.org/6.6/release-notes.html https://docs.gradle.org/6.6/release-notes.html