Is there a commitment to improve kotlin gradle dsl performance? I'd love to switch to it just for the developer productivity boost of using

cmd+b

to see where a dependency version var is defined in a project with many modules. I am not sure that the dev productivity boost outweighs the marginal slowdown in compile time. And when major open source kotlin repositories (eg coroutines) are not using the dsl it signals that there is not even confidence within jetbrains around using it. You can

ctrl+j

for documentation lookup but there is little-to-no documentation of the dsl-ified version of the android plugin, and often the function signatures are not informative.

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/issues/1938 seems to indicate that they are pushing towards using the DSL and https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin uses it as well, so I don't think Jetbrains is shying away from it

I found a github issue tracking performance benchmarks over the last year a while back. I'll dig it up and link here.

yea, I think it's still mostly the same, but the actual stats show a few hundred milliseconds of difference from recent tests: https://builds.gradle.org/repository/download/Gradle_Check_PerformanceSlowCoordinator/35962587:id/report-performance-performance-tests.zip!/report/tests/configure-largeJavaMultiProject.html or https://builds.gradle.org/repository/download/Gradle_Check_PerformanceSlowCoordinator/35962587:id/report-performance-performance-tests.zip!/report/tests/configure-largeJavaMultiProjectKotlinDsl.html

In most projects, you’re changing code far more frequently that you do its build scripts. But when you do change the build scripts, it’s much better for me to actually be able to click into it and make sure I’m doing it right. With Groovy, you’re mostly left hoping that the plugins’ documentation is up-to-date and complete (which is not always the case). The slight hit to performance is well worth the benefits, IMO. I honestly don’t feel like I ever really understood Gradle beyond the surface-level until I started migrating my scripts to Kotlin DSL, and my builds still feel just as snappy in day-to-day development.

yes, I spent a ton of time digging into Gradle source code to figure out the magic of Groovy when migrating to Kotlin DSL, I think it's much nicer for building a model of how things work

When nothing has changed, Groovy vs. Kotlin performance is quite similar. The main difference is with the actual compilation of the Kotlin scripts. It’s ~3 times slower than Groovy.

interesting, perhaps that's just because I have such a small set of scripts that the accessor gen for initial gradle setup seems like it takes ages

Ah right, that’s something different. When you change Gradle version, Kotlin extensions for the whole Gradle API get generated, and they are compiled using the Kotlin compiler. Can take a while yes 😕

Link on the compiler speed? Curious to read more

It was announced at KotlinConf. There’s some information here https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2019/12/what-to-expect-in-kotlin-1-4-and-beyond/

Ah yep I completely forgot about the first part of that 😅

Indeed!

i think there is newer documentation that states that the improved compiler speed is not coming in 1.4.x

hum 😕 any pointer @christophsturm?

actually i searched and found nothing, but i remember a jetbrains employee saying here in this slack that the new compiler will not be enabled in 1.4 timeframe. the webpage you posted also says “not in 1.4”.

Found this https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C7L3JB43G/p1591432433214300?thread_ts=1591382245.213300

cool. thats what i was searching for but I did not find it

I’m confident Kotlin folks will make it fast eventually. But it’s a bit sad we’ll have to wait more.

Is that meant to read as the new compiler frontend will not be ready until at least 1.6?

i read it as not ready until at least 1.5 and possibly 1.6

I guess there will be some steps yeah. Maybe we can hope for experimental performance improvements in 1.5 stabilized towards 1.6