Bazel VS Gradle

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/

A ("shared") build service is kind of like a singleton, in that when you register one in any project, it's available in all projects as a single instance. (This unfortunately turns out not to be true, in some cases, when using composite builds, but can be worked around.) An actual singleton (global static instance) doesn't work at all, for the record—try it if you want to lose some sanity. Anyway, use a build service whenever you need global mutable state in your build.

When using build tools like Maven or Gradle, you can configure environment variables in the build scripts or configuration files.

For large projects, purpose-made build tools such as Gradle and Maven are preferred for managing the directory structure since they introduce additional semantics for managing test code and other programming languages (among lots of other things). Most IDEs can integrate with these build tools easily. If you're just starting out though, I wouldn't worry too much about these, you can visit them later.

Project Build and Management: Apache Maven 3 (3.9.5), Gradle 8 (8.3)

No wonder this had been raised previously, https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/15383

Ktor, a powerful web framework built with Kotlin, offers a lightweight and flexible solution for building web applications. In this article, we will guide you through the process of creating a Ktor project manually using Gradle and SDKMAN!. By following the steps below, you'll have a basic Ktor project up and running in no time.

The details regarding the code compiling would vary from one project to another. For that project, it seems that it uses Gradle (a helper tool) for compiling. Check Gradle's documentation for more information.

At the moment, Java 20 is the latest version, but Java 17 is the latest LTS release. It's usually best to use an LTS release, because the latest releases won't be widely supported. And that's true of Gradle too. You're using Gradle 8.0, but not even the latest version of Gradle (8.2) fully supports Java 20. You'll have to wait for Gradle 8.3 to use Java 20.