Gradle is mainly being pushed by Grails and Android development.
I don't know of any other project using it. We are always doing Maven or Ant.
If Gradle is the future I hope it gets improved, I gave up on Android Studio given its dependency on Gradle and how it drags my dual core with 8 GB to its knees when compiling.
> I gave up on Android Studio given its dependency on Gradle and how it drags my dual core with 8 GB to its knees when compiling
That could be the slow, dynamically-typed Groovy in Gradle that's dragging your machine. Gradle needs to bundle another build language. Since the goal of statically-typed (and hence speedier) Kotlin is to make it easier to write IntelliJ IDEA [1], on which Android Studio is built, instead of using Java, the logical choice is Kotlin.
Gradle's developer says they'll happily support any community effort to create additional build script engines other than Groovy, but it isn't a priority for them right now [2]. Perhaps the Kotlin team need to kick off a Kotlin build engine for Gradle (though because one of the Kotlin developers was a victim of the Groovy++ fiasco, I'd understand if the Kotlin people are hesitant about having anything more to do with Groovy ecosystem software like Gradle).
Kotlin was exactly the reason I was thinking to move from Eclipse ADT to Android Studio.
So far I have been using the Eclipse ADT/CDT for my hobby development, mainly with C++ (just graphics stuff).
Then I thought to try out Kotlin instead, but could not. It was worse than waiting for my NDK C++ builds to finish, with the whole computer at 100% CPU usage.
I ended up filing a ticket, like many other developers already did.
Is Grails really pushing Gradle adoption? My experience has always been that the integration between the two is pretty bad. Are things better now that they finally... released a real Gradle plugin to support Grails 2?
Personal anecdote, I stopped trying to develop for MC Forge in version 1.7 because the gradle build they switched to was unbelievably slow and difficult to use. After several days of poking it, I still couldn't understand why asking gradle for a simple list of available tasks was taking >10 seconds, and when I tried to give my workspace to a friend on another computer, I discovered I had totally I failed to get a list of coherent commands that I was 100% sure could reproduce my workspace on a new machine, because of large amounts of scattered hidden state I had failed to detect. Part of this might be poor build config design, but gradle certainly helped enable a lot of poor behavior and certainly doesn't impress me with its performance for trivial tasks.
I don't know of any other project using it. We are always doing Maven or Ant.
If Gradle is the future I hope it gets improved, I gave up on Android Studio given its dependency on Gradle and how it drags my dual core with 8 GB to its knees when compiling.