Build managers

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Wed, 2015-02-04 at 14:17 +0000, Kagamin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 2 February 2015 at 16:30:22 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> > While I've no doubt the functionality here is good, I think
> > following the Ant colony down the XML branch will ultimately be a 
> > pest that's hard to control.
> > 
> > In my current job, we have ant scripts to install our dev
> > builds that is 10k+ lines long! And noone knows all of it. A
> > single line change gives me nightmares!! It started off nice
> > and small, but grew to a monster.
> > 
> > We're now moving towards gradle as we can control the install much 
> > better with a fully fledged programming environment.
> > Should be much easier read too.
> 
> Was it the type system, which gave you troubles? Groovy is said to 
> be a dynamic language, which can be worse in managing 10kloc 
> projects.

I believe there is a crucial point here, the size of the project being 
build is actually irrelevant, it was that the Ant file was 10k LoC. I 
cannot conceive of a Gradle build system being 10k LoC, BUT if it 
were, then instead of all teh XML hacking to manage 10k LoC, you have a
proper programming language Groovy.

Groovy is optionally typed, so if you use it typeless all variables 
are Object. If you specify types then there is run type type checking. 
If you want compile time type checking of Groovy you use the 
@TypeChecked AST transform. If you want fully statically typed and 
compiled Groovy then use @CompileStatic. Yes you read that right 
Groovy is a fully typeless dynamic languages and it is also a fully 
compile-time typechecked and compile static language. What is not to 
like about this. As long as you are on a JVM of course.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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