Prefer to use statically compiled languages for plugins?

[sourcedelica]

In Designing Gradle plugins it says

It is recommended to use a statically-typed language like Java or Kotlin for implementing plugins to decrease the likelihood of binary incompatibilities. Should you decide on using Groovy for your plugin implementation then it is a good choice to use the annotation @groovy.transform.CompileStatic.

I'm not sure if you covered it in your video(s) but it would be interesting to learn more about this recommendation, since you've implemented the range of possibilities in this project.

[jjohannes]

No I have not talked about that topic explicitly in the videos yet. I have a section on considerations which language to use in the README here: https://github.com/jjohannes/gradle-plugins-howto#which-option-should-i-choose

This part of the Gradle documentation is only about Groovy. It could probably state that more directly.

If you use plain Groovy, or Gradle's Groovy DSL, more things are happening at Gradle runtime as Groovy code is not compiled in the traditional Java way. It compiles to reflective calls, which are more expensive than normal compiled method calls in compiled code from Java or Kotlin. (If you want to use Groovy, you can make it do more static compilation by annotating you Groovy classes with groovy.transform.CompileStatic.)

My experience though is that for a few local convention plugins, this difference is not noticeable. I would not say that this is an argument against using the Gradle Groovy DSL in you project if you prefer it for other reasons.

If you publish plugins to the Plugin Portal to be used by others, then I would recommend using static compilation. Not only for the performance aspects, but also because problems that can occur when using the plugin in a different Gradle version can be harder to discover/investigate.

[sourcedelica]

Thanks Jendrik!