Who is winning the build war with Scala So Far?

[eyalroth]

@Jasper-M @jducoeur @Ichoran

Comparing SBT’s maturity and community to its alternatives includes the following:

• Number and frequency of contributions.
• Community size (based on Google Trends, stack-overflow questions, messages in forums).
• Current major issues with SBT:
  • Inconsistency with Maven / Ivy publishing and dependencies (#2422 #2674 #2687 #3486 #3570 #3725 #4317).
  • Tests:
    • No support for stopping build on test failure (#2450).
    • No JUnit 5 support (while current JUnit 4 support is more than a year old and isn’t tested with SBT 1.x).
    • Test failures are hard to find (#2998).
    • Other test-related bugs (#2964 #4038 #4243 #4480).
  • Lacking Windows support (#1412 #3386 #4322 #4421 and probably #4188 too).
  • And just plain old bugs and missing features (#1722 #1926 #2446 #3187 #3443 #3473 #3497 #3572 #4166 #4168 #4193 #4394).

Adopting SBT as the main build tool in the Scala community – that means both community focus and the efforts of the core contributors – shifts the attention from the already existing and quite viable tools out there - and for what reason?

I do not see any major advantage of SBT in comparison to its alternatives. All it does in my opinion is splitting the community and making it much harder for others adopt Scala, especially those who come from the Java world.

SBT’s incremental compiler – Zinc – is a different manner and really has no alternative. It’s not suprising that the SBT team decided to extract it from the main SBT repository into its own repository.