On 22 Jun 2014, at 2:01 am, Steven Walters <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Russel Winder <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> As for assembly language, no applications programmer should ever have to >> use it! > > Assembly always has a place, and that place more commonly appears in > maximizing speed/performance. > This is more frequent in applications that have a heavy mathematical > background/focus. > statistics/scientific analysis, and video/audio processing are some > examples of this. > >> >> Someone on the Gradle native code team needs to write a short article >> saying what Gradle beats Dub, SCons, Waf and CMake. If this argument >> cannot be made convincingly then Gradle will have no future in the wider >> world of native code build. From experience it is hard enough weaning >> people off Make, and introducing Python is a battle. I suspect >> introducing JVM is going to be an even bigger battle than introducing >> PVM. > > I say that Gradle's (initial?) target audience for the native code > support is not development teams that deal purely in native code. > It'll be harder to convince them away from what they've been used to > for years and it "works" enough for them. > That is more summarily, those teams don't have a pain point that needs > resolving. > > Instead Gradle's first goal should be targeting teams/"houses" that > deal in a mixture of jvm and non-jvm based languages. > In my opinion, this is because there isn't much in a good single > solution for dealing with the combination of all of them. This is exactly the plan. Our goal with the native support at this stage is to make life better for those organisations that produce software for a bunch of different platforms, such as for the jvm, android, the native runtime, and javascript (as byte code for the web - not just the language). Using a single tool to provide a consistent interface, conventions and workflow for development is important for these teams. For most teams these days, building, verifying and releasing software is much more than just ‘build my jar’ or ‘link my binary’. One thing that is missing from the Gradle story at the moment is dependency management that works across all these domains. This is something we’re working on at the moment. For Gradle to be a realistic option for teams that develop native software only, we need to do something about performance - we need to make configuration time much faster, and we need to push parallel execution more. We’ve started on improving configuration time and this should lead to better paralysation too. -- Adam Murdoch Gradle Co-founder http://www.gradle.org CTO Gradleware Inc. - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting http://www.gradleware.com
