[dcposch]

> Gradle is good enough to be getting on with, but i'm looking forward to the next step.

Check out Buck. It's fast, the codebase and general complexity is a tiny fraction compared to Maven or Gradle, and it's more sound in at least one fundamental way. (It uses file hashes instead of modtimes to figure out if a task has to be rerun.)

I agree with the rest of your post. Most build systems suck. Here's an off-hand idea:

All build systems I know work share the same core concept, a directed acyclic graph of tasks. Each task has inputs (which might be the output of another task) and if the inputs are changed then the task is rerun. That same idea also covers a lot of systems for data processing.

Why can't we have a simple, minimal tool for doing only that? Then, we could plug in different task definitions for different uses (eg building a Go project, a Java project, or running a data pipeline).

This seems preferable to a bunch of different application-specific build systems that each roll their own DAG, and their own DSL for defining tasks.

[rwallace]

We do have such a tool. It's called make.

[sorbits]

And the “modern” reimplementation of make is ninja: http://martine.github.io/ninja/