Go almost instant build time is a huge productivity boost when compared to Java. You get both the solidity of a typed language, and the development speed of interpreted languages (py, js).
Gradle, when the daemon is runnning is very fast, people just often fck up their build scripts to include config-time run functionality, which is just all around a stupid thing to do.
It only ever runs tasks that actually have to be run, has integration with javac, can work in parallel, and even has cross-company build caches if needed.
Also don't forget that Java can do hot reloads with the debugger, or with tools like JRebel. Certain frameworks support it 100% and it will be much much faster than whatever go does.
We are in the process of switching to Gradle at work and I'm not sure I like it. I used Gradle when building some OSS projects, but my experience wasn't that great.
Just make sure that whoever writes the majority of the build file actually understands gradle, at least its fundamentals. It really is not hard, and afterwards it is a really great tool that can significantly improve compile/CI times.
I've never seen gradle be faster than Maven. I have no idea what purose its daemon serves or its promise to "parallelize workloads". Which workloads? Its purpose is to build the project, fast. It spends about a magnitude of time more just trying to start up, even with daemon running.
Has never been the case in my many years of using it. Hundreds of MB permanent RAM usage for the daemon (which it wouldn’t require if it was properly designed), everything taking well above 10s. None of this has ever been an issue with Maven.
If you avoid pre-Java 11 modules in Apache Maven, it is very fast to build. Plus, IntelliJ is auto-magically incremental build. Can you give some specific examples where Java build tools are slow? Most Java developers spend their whole day in an IDE that is doing incremental build, jumping in and out of a debugger to fix bugs or broken unit tests.
Maven is okay-ish, Gradle is an abomination. Incremental compilation doesn't always work, and the fact that the build tools often spends a magnitude or more time just starting up than actually doing useful work is inexcusable.