[guelo]

I don't think it's the IDE, it's the build system. When Google pushed everyone over to Android Studio they also pushed everyone from Ant to Gradle. Gradle is supposed to be a better Maven but it's just dog slow. Just typing gradle --help takes over 3 seconds on my Macbook Pro.

[airless_cotton]

Migrating to sbt-android has been a revelation coming from Gradle.

It's bizarre that a one-man-team beats the mighty Google in pretty much everything.

The build is so freaking fast that it runs ProGuard by default – and beats a Gradle build without ProGuard.

That dev implemented and shipped Instant Run way before Google "invented" it, and it's still faster compared to Google's implementation.

[pjmlp]

I really don't get their hype around Gradle, if it wasn't for it, most likely no one would care about Groovy any more.

Since my focus is the NDK, which keeps being half-done in Gradle, I keep using Ant + ndk-build and have migrated to Visual Studio 2015 for my Android hobby coding.

[airless_cotton]

As far as I know, sbt-android just recently got even more support/features for NDK (on top of the existing support):

The plugin can now manage and auto-install SDKs, tools, support repos and NDKs, so no messing around with Google's `android` tool anymore!

Maybe this is of use to you.

https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/7b32e55f... https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/53b855de...

[pjmlp]

Thanks!

[xirdstl]

Was it ever popular in SV? No. That doesn't mean no one is using or cares about it.

For my day job, we use Groovy for our Spring Boot app. I love it.

I've also done a lot of Grails development, which I enjoyed also.

[pjmlp]

It was popular in Germany around 2007. All JUGs were doing presentations about Groovy and Grails.

It was even on JEE roadmap to be an alternative language for JSF applications, presented at JSF Days in Vienna.

Nowadays if it wasn't for Gradle, I wouldn't even notice it exists.

[mhd]

I remember those days. Not a lot came out of those presentations, though. It was a lot about Java guys having a bit of dynamic language envy, while having to code with Struts and 1.4 Swing all day. A way of getting that hype and with it some new tech to play with into the enterprise by a backdoor. Which is way too hard to do.

Mobile dev being new, even Java developers get to play with more shiny toys. For good or ill...

[vorg]

It's a stretch to say Gradle "uses Groovy". In practise, it more like uses a tiny non-Turing Complete subset of Groovy.

[amake]

No, large parts of Gradle are actually implemented in Groovy. You're referring to the DSL, which can be used purely declaratively, but it's not limited to such use (you can use all Groovy language featured in Gradle scripts).

[vorg]

> large parts of Gradle are actually implemented in Groovy

I thought it was just the plugin and DSL handling code. That would explain why Gradle's so slow, then.

> the DSL, which can be used purely declaratively, but it's not limited to such use

Virtually no-one uses Groovy procedurally, only declaratively, in Gradle build scripts, so although that's true in theory, in practise only the non-Turing Complete portions of Groovy are used. Calling it a programming language there is like calling HTML one because you can embed Javascript in HTML.

[cel1ne]

Put

    org.gradle.daemon=true

in your .gradle/gradle.properties. Slow startup is an old JVM problem.

[pjmlp]

> Slow startup is an old JVM problem.

No it not, when people make use of Java code, it starts in ms.

It is only slow when running languages like Groovy or Clojure on top of it.