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Having used ant as a build system for Android projects, I don't blame them. In my admittedly limited experience (Windows 7 x64, ant, Android SDK) ant is terrib

Having used ant as a build system for Android projects, I don't blame them. In my admittedly limited experience (Windows 7 x64, ant, Android SDK) ant is terribly slow to build projects with multiple source library dependencies and throwing hardware at the problem doesn't speed it up that much.

diek 13y ago
I don't see how this is an Ant-specific issue. Ant is just calling into javac with a classpath parameter. The actual execution time spent in Ant should be minimal.
- theelfismike 13y ago
  With Android, ant makes naive assumptions. For example, most open source library projects that you include in a project don't change from build to build, but ant dutifully recompiles them each time instead of caching the output until the files in that project are changed or I manually clean the build output.
  - JetSpiegel 13y ago
    That surely means Ant is make, only worse.
    - taeric 13y ago
      "Only worse" is probably not fair. Though, is it really surprising that a newer make file degenerates into the same problems as old ones? Which will then lead down a path of a set of scripts/utilities on top of said system to standardize on a set of targets and deal with known issues. And suddenly we have reinvented another old tool, autotools. We'll probably find ourselves in their troubles soon enough.
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        There was a link submitted here (I can't find it now) a few weeks ago that talked exactly about that. Most build systems are just reimplementations of make, which makes them worse , because make has been battle tested for ages.
        taeric 13y ago
        Amusingly, that story is what convinced me to finally read up on autotools. It has been interesting to see just how much they already covered. In fact, the only thing the autotools don't do, that every current tool does, is download the dependencies. Which, is not surprising, since fast network connections are a relatively new thing. And I'm actually not sure I care for the download of dependencies thing. It is nice at first, but quickly gets to people pushing another thing to download, instead of making do with what you have. This is plain embarrassing when the downloaded part offers practically nothing on top of what you had.
    - stephen_g 13y ago
      I'm confused. That doesn't sound like Make's behavior at all. Make, when used properly, is still an pretty smart tool.
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        That's the worse part of Ant.
  - krzyk 13y ago
    Doesn't and use prebuild jars for libraries? If not then maybe you should think about switching to maven.

diek 13y ago

I don't see how this is an Ant-specific issue. Ant is just calling into javac with a classpath parameter. The actual execution time spent in Ant should be minimal.

theelfismike 13y ago
With Android, ant makes naive assumptions. For example, most open source library projects that you include in a project don't change from build to build, but ant dutifully recompiles them each time instead of caching the output until the files in that project are changed or I manually clean the build output.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  That surely means Ant is make, only worse.
  - taeric 13y ago
    "Only worse" is probably not fair. Though, is it really surprising that a newer make file degenerates into the same problems as old ones? Which will then lead down a path of a set of scripts/utilities on top of said system to standardize on a set of targets and deal with known issues. And suddenly we have reinvented another old tool, autotools. We'll probably find ourselves in their troubles soon enough.
    - JetSpiegel 13y ago
      There was a link submitted here (I can't find it now) a few weeks ago that talked exactly about that. Most build systems are just reimplementations of make, which makes them worse , because make has been battle tested for ages.
      - taeric 13y ago
        Amusingly, that story is what convinced me to finally read up on autotools. It has been interesting to see just how much they already covered. In fact, the only thing the autotools don't do, that every current tool does, is download the dependencies. Which, is not surprising, since fast network connections are a relatively new thing. And I'm actually not sure I care for the download of dependencies thing. It is nice at first, but quickly gets to people pushing another thing to download, instead of making do with what you have. This is plain embarrassing when the downloaded part offers practically nothing on top of what you had.
  - stephen_g 13y ago
    I'm confused. That doesn't sound like Make's behavior at all. Make, when used properly, is still an pretty smart tool.
    - JetSpiegel 13y ago
      That's the worse part of Ant.
- krzyk 13y ago
  Doesn't and use prebuild jars for libraries? If not then maybe you should think about switching to maven.