Kradle

Libraries
1

I’m super super excited about the upcoming Kotlin support in Gradle! My two major pain points with Gradle are due to the dynamic typing of Groovy.

Even as an experienced Gradle developer, it is very hard to “discover” Gradle functionality through the IDE. The lack of code completion and documentation lookup from within the IDE, combined with Gradle often offering multiple solutions to a problem, is a tough challenge.

Gradle touts fully programmable builds. Which is true. But what they are not telling you is that the debugging experience for these builds is nothing short of abysmal. Again, this is due to the dynamic dispatching in Groovy and due to the way how the extension mechanism of builds works.

I’m glad to see that Gradle and JetBrains are cooperating and believe that this is an important step for both sides. I hope that this cooperation will alleviate those pain points in the long run. I also hope that this cooperation will impact the Gradle support in IntelliJ. Major speedups and a seamless integration into the IDE come to mind. But hey, no pressure :slight_smile:

As a side note: these topics kept annoying me so much in the past that I started looking into whether it would be feasible to integrate Kotlin as a DSL into Gradle. Due to the complexity and the amount of work involved that never got very far.

Thanks, guys!

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Hey @Dittert, thanks for saying so! Indeed, we’re really excited about what this is going to mean for debuggability of builds and everything else you mention. Hope to see you around the repository and #gradle Slack channel!

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I hope the Gradle documentation will show examples in Groovy and Kotlin side by side. There are framework docs allowing to change the programming language of the examples, like Aurelia (see top right corner). Although I like tabs above the code examples a bit better.