[Scons-users] Scons and ant

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2015-03-03 at 00:24 -0500, William Blevins wrote:
> Owen,
> 
> I have a general question though.  Why are you wrapping Ant with 
> SCons? What purpose does that serve?  Both Ant and SCons are full 
> fledged build tools perfectly capable of building Java on their own, 
> though admittedly,
> SCons runs into performance problems on large jars due to the amount 
> of smartness it tries to achieve.  Personally, I hate ANT scripts, 
> so I will
> take the trade-off any day.  Runaway Jar lib/jar size is a common 
> sin in practice anyway.

Anyone still using Ant really should be considering switching to 
Gradle pdq.

SCons' play in the pure Java build situation is not that great, and it 
cannot play in the mixed Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure arena nor in the 
Kotlin and Ceylon arena. Where SCons still might have a play is in the 
"a little bit of Java, lots of C++" area. However Gradle is now 
catching up fast on the C++ native code builds and so may be the 
preferred choice for mixed Java/C++ builds now.

I have no problem helping people improve the SCons Java support, but 
it will be an uphill struggle, and without Groovy support, one 
probably not worth fighting. But I have probably said this before.

For the avoidance of doubt: nothing handles LaTeX builds as well as 
SCons :-)  

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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