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by pjmlp 3708 days ago
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.
3 comments
airless_cotton 3708 days ago
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...

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pjmlp 3708 days ago
Thanks!
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xirdstl 3708 days ago
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.

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pjmlp 3708 days ago
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.

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mhd 3708 days ago
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...

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vorg 3708 days ago
It's a stretch to say Gradle "uses Groovy". In practise, it more like uses a tiny non-Turing Complete subset of Groovy.
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amake 3708 days ago
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).
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vorg 3708 days ago
> 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.

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