I am taking a little time to learn Gradle, a build system based on a DSL defined on top of Groovy.
Since Kotlin is going to support DSLs and has the advantage of static typing, it occurs to me that an even better build system could be create with Kotlin.
Just curious - anyone thinking about this?
– Randy
I think it's definitely a good idea. As someone who hasn't worked much with Java in the past, something like Maven seems quite... verbose (to be polite).
It almost seems like, instead of reinventing the wheel, someone could try to port SBT (http://www.scala-sbt.org/) over to Kotlin.
At any rate, I agree, it would be nice if there was a defacto standard build system for Kotlin projects, especially if it could take advantage of Kotlin’s language features.
There's no such project being developed, but the idea is definitely good.
I've started to use SBT for my build system for NetKernel development.
I would very much like to have a Kotlin plugin for SBT.
Do you know if anyone is working on this?
– Randy
AFAIK, no
Thank you for the update on this.
I have been wrestling with build systems for a while for development with a platform that uses multiple languages. Ant is too old, Maven too opinionated, and I’ve given up on Gradle as I find it too hard to extend and determine exactly what it’s doing.
I then found SBT. Very solid, fast, logical - but a bit complex.
Because it’s written in Scala, I started to look at that language again. Wow! It’s complex. I much prefer the results of my experimentation with Kotlin - I think you are on the right track.
But, I’m stuck not being able to compile Kotlin until I can figure out how to support it within SBT.
I know it’s not Kotlin based and I’m really not sure how many people use it - but I’ll be watching for anyone interested in a plugin for SBT… Maybe I can get some help writing one.
– Randy