On: Gradle 3.0 Release Notes

[pjmlp]

From my Android SDK experience, Ant and Maven are much faster than Gradle.

If you check the developer Q&A videos at Google IO 2016, one of the issues that got discussed was precisely the slow builds.

It is also interesting that they had to re-write the public API in Java for Gradle 3, as part of their speed improvements.

[darylteo → pjmlp]

From what I know, the Groovy runtime was a constant-time bottle neck for all builds (time to initialise, interpret etc.), hence the perceived "slow builds" for any small to medium sized project.

[Eridrus → pjmlp]

My experience is similar to yours - when not using the dragle daemon.

IIRC the gradle daemon made things competetive if not faster, though it's been a while since I tried.

[pjmlp → Eridrus]

Yet Ant and Maven don't need a daemon to be fast.

There is a recent post from the Android team, where they advise to allocate between 2 and 5 GBs for the daemon!

[Eridrus → pjmlp]

Wow, that's totally crazy. Is that due to Android projects needing to link against Android which is a very large library?

I don't recall it being that dire for my non-Android project, but I don't recall checking my mem usage either...

[pjmlp → Eridrus]

Due to the DEX conversion.