Who is winning the build war with Scala So Far?

You don’t need to pay for professional support for sbt any more than you do for maven or gradle. If you work at a company where having that kind of help and assurance is comforting / worth the cost, it’s available. If you want your own engineers to handle it, that works too.

As @jducoeur said, there are valid criticisms of sbt, but these aren’t the right ones. “sbt isn’t maven” is true, and maven is more widespread, but also “Scala isn’t Java”, and similar arguments apply. There are often considerable benefits to using sbt over maven. If you don’t want those benefits you can use maven anyway, but don’t begrudge people who do want those benefits the possibility of having them! (Why use maven instead of ant, anyway? Why ant instead of make? At some point, the former tool was less well established than the latter.)

If SBT started to build things other than Scala, it might have a fighting chance to be widely accepted and even replace Maven. But I do not thing SBT is being targeted to other programming languages. That being the case, more than likely it will be difficult for SBT to ever be widely accepted.

If you build with Maven, are happy about building with Maven, and don’t want to stop building with Maven, I don’t see the problem: keep doing that.

If you build with sbt, but are unhappy about building with sbt, and would rather build with Maven, the solution seems simple: build with Maven instead.

@Jasper-M @jducoeur @Ichoran

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

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.

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