Gradle, Groovy, Kotlin. FTW?¶
| gradle | groovy | kotlin |
You’ve probably heard about “Kotlin-based approach to writing Gradle build scripts”. A lot of noise was produced based on this announcement and Cédric Champeau tried to explain the real state of Groovy, Gradle and their future relationship.
Just to avoid different speculation about “Gradle is written in Groovy” and now “it will be re-written in Kotlin” here are some numbers:
- Let’s check the Gradle repo language statistic provided by GitHub
- Gradle root folder has several very important sub-folders:
buildSrc- https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/-ganizing_build_logic.html#sec:build_sources[It's related to Gradle -ild process]config- nothing interesting:condenarcandcheckstyleconfigsdesign-docs- markdown documentationgradle- Gradle scriptssubprojects- Gradle sources. It’s our goal to analyze this folder and understand the language statistics
subprojectscontains several interesting sub-folders:src/main- actual “gradle” source codesrc/test,src/integTestandsrc/testFixturestest source code.
- Now, count the language stats by https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc[cloc] tool:
src/main:
$ cloc-1.66.exe --match-d="src/main/" --found=oicloc2.log .
6052 text files.
Wrote oicloc2.log
5975 unique files.
1881 files ignored.
https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.66 T=19.50 s (298.2 files/s, 23192.5 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Java 5466 56689 128109 238097
Groovy 278 3100 5179 14336
JavaScript 3 160 272 4528
XML 15 8 0 669
CSS 6 64 38 354
XSLT 1 24 31 140
C++ 7 7 0 51
C 6 22 22 50
Scala 15 12 39 50
C/C++ Header 6 9 4 33
HTML 3 9 17 24
Objective C++ 2 7 0 18
Assembly 2 1 0 17
JSP 3 0 0 14
IDL 1 2 0 14
Objective C 1 3 0 7
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 5815 60117 133711 258402
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Based on this raw analysis we have 93% Java files and 4.7% Groovy files.
- Let’s add test (
src/test,src/integTestandsrc/testFixtures) folders to our statistics:
$ cloc-1.66.exe --match-d="src/(test|integTest|testFixtures)/" --found=oicloc3.log .
3867 text files.
Wrote oicloc3.log
3775 unique files.
2657 files ignored.
https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.66 T=15.24 s (243.1 files/s, 29213.4 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Groovy 3043 65654 47398 291716
Java 536 5830 7278 23568
XML 57 19 36 1845
Maven 22 57 20 571
HTML 10 18 10 430
Scala 24 48 122 162
JavaScript 5 14 13 105
CSS 1 19 0 91
DTD 1 54 164 33
XSLT 2 6 0 20
CoffeeScript 1 7 8 13
YAML 1 0 0 7
JSP 1 0 0 6
SQL 1 2 1 2
C 1 0 0 1
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 3706 71728 55050 318570
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As You can see we have 14.5% Java files and 82% Groovy files.
Summary¶
Gradle is Java-based project and it uses Groovy for testing and as a DSL implementation tool, nothing more. The noise around “Groovy vs Kotlin” for DSL implementation inside Gradle sounds strange. Gradle Inc. has just made pragmatic decision. That’s it.