The Kotlin and Groovy DSLs should have similar performance characteristics #15886
Description
Expected Behavior
The Kotlin and Groovy DSLs have as much as possible similar performance characteristics.
IOW there's no outlier use case for which the performance characteristics make using one or the other DSL a penalty.
Current Behavior
What follows is the current state of affairs as Gradle 6.8 for four use cases:
- first use (e.g. ephemeral CI agent or clean workstation without build cache)
- buildSrc abi change
- buildSrc non-abi change
- nothing changes
Data for Gradle 6.8
24 Jan 2025 Update (@oleg-nenashev ): As the Gradle's TeamCity instance is no longer public, the performance reports are no longer accessible. The structure has also changed since 6.8. See #32164
The data below comes from performance tests run on the Gradle CI. Those tests use a build with a large number of projects and build scripts, the build scripts being rather simple, and they run on both the Groovy and Kotlin DSL for comparison.
Old Links
| Use case | Groovy | Kotlin | Differences |
|---|---|---|---|
| First use | 🟢 33.5s | 🔴 76.2s | Groovy DSL is 2.2x faster |
buildSrc abi change |
🟢 13.2s | 🔴 42.3s | Groovy DSL is 3.2x faster |
buildSrc non-abi change |
🔴 13s | 🟢 5.2s | Kotlin DSL is 2.5x faster |
| Nothing changes | 🔵 1.7s | 🔵 1.8s | Similar performance |
The numbers above are, at the time of writing, for current release branch of Gradle that is the upcoming 6.8.1. See:
This issue is a follow up to gradle/kotlin-dsl-samples#902 which resides in an archived repository.
One of the reasons the Kotlin DSL is slower when it is is the time it takes to the Kotlin compiler to compile the scripts.
See https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-24668