Glowstone VS BuildToolsGUI

Assuming you mean this Glowstone, you'll see they themselves acknowledge that "it is not ready for survival".

It's definitely not a realistic replacement for modded Minecraft in general, since that's really hundereds of games and Mineclone only aims to replace Minecraft itself. For modded, I'm not sure what the answer is. Even most third party clients/servers that are compatible with vanilla Minecraft don't support Forge mods. Stevenarella might support Forge to some extent, but I'm not sure how it works since Forge is written in Java and Stevenarella is written in Rust. I'm not aware of any third party servers that support Forge in any capacity, but Glowstone (which actually seems like a pretty good third party server by the way) does support Bukkit plugins.

Also to add to this, if you don't need full vanilla functionality and are more focus on higher player count than something slightly more experimental but more performant might be your best bet like GlowstoneMC (glowstone supports paper plugins) or Minestrom

You could. Glowstone is a Minecraft server written in Java (without any of Mojang's code) but it is still not feature complete from what I heard, so things are missing. When I tried it, it seemed pretty solid and fast though.

I forked a project [1] in 2015 to remove Gradle, and it then quickly subsumed the original project, remaining under active development to this day.

There were other reasons, but de-gradling was one of the main motivations for my fork, and among the first of the major changes I made. The project is an implementation of an API which was discontinued by the original developers, but initially was built using Maven.

After switching from Gradle (which the project switched to in 2014) back to Maven, build times significantly decreased and development became much more pleasant. I found Gradle to be like a speed bump slowing down development, and reverting back to Maven was like a breath of fresh air. Simple, straightforward, and fast. Maven may not be perfect, but it does the job well.

[1] An open source Bukkit server implementation, https://github.com/GlowstoneMC/Glowstone -> http://github.com/GlowstonePlusPlus/GlowstonePlusPlus

Now, if the vanilla server gets too laggy, you will need to switch it out with either a spigot or paper server. I recommend running PaperMC, since that is a fork of spigot (which includes all of the features that spigot has), and it's also open source and gets updated quite often. PaperMC fixes bugs and exploits, and increases server performance so there is no lag at all. Now, to get a spigot server, there are 2 ways: build it via gitbash or get it from https://getbukkit.org/download/spigot. Both methods work. So, to build it, you will need to get the buildtools gui from here. Now, take a download of it, and run it. If windows prompts you saying that it is not safe, just allow it to run by clicking more info, and clicking run anyway. Now, that will pop open a gui, and hit update buildtools. That will make a buildtools folder, which is needed for later. Now hit run buildtools. That will start making the git needed, and when prompted, save it to where u need it. Then it will start downloading the git, and once it's done, just exit it. Now, go to that buildtools folder it made (most likely in the downloads folder) and make sure to go to the git bash and open that up. Now, we want to change it to a diff directory by doing the cd cmd. For example, if the buildtools folder is in my d drive, it would be /d/buildtools . You need to do it step by step. So type in cd /[insert drive letter here]. hit enter, and type in cd /[insert drive letter here]/[insert buildtools folder name here] . then click enter. Now, copy and paste in this cmd: