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Comparison with sbt

Sbt is in many respects an awesome tool, it really is. But it is the wrong tool.

It is complex​

The case against sbt has been made before, most eloquently by Li Haoyi in the So, what's wrong with SBT? blog post.

It is slow​

Even worse, it is also slow.

  • Starting a JVM is slow.
  • Starting a Scala compiler is slow
  • Compiling the build is slow
  • Evaluating the build is slow
  • Resolving dependencies is slow
  • Every plugin introduces more slowness, multiplied by number of projects

It cannot manage its own build files​

The build file is arbitrarily complicated scala code. The most common build changes like dependency updates, project renames, combining projects are manual operations.