I work with gradle for the better part of 5 years and use it to build Unity projects. I wrote multiple custom plugins and maintain them still. Learning how gra

I work with gradle for the better part of 5 years and use it to build Unity projects. I wrote multiple custom plugins and maintain them still. Learning how gradle works was hard. The official docs didn’t help in the beginning. I only know how to author build scripts because I spend a lot of time in the internals. I don’t use many third party plugins because they never 100% work as intended and become a liability later on when a gradle update is needed. But do I think it is too complicated and abstract? Yes and No. The main problem is that gradle contains a load of old Bagage. Most concepts which are still in the product center around lazy evaluation and to decouple the what from how. The introduction of Providers a couple of years ago was a pivotal point. Writing lazy evaluated scripts was only possible through private methods which used groovy magic to implement this. I never saw a build system or build tool be just simple when the desired outcome is decoupled and fast builds. Would I pick gradle today? I guess not. But I still think it is a great tool. I looked at nix and hazel and these tools are also not simple.