News

Gradle Inc. Speeds Scala Compiler Times with Triplequote Acquisition

• By John K. Waters
• February 21, 2023

Gradle, Inc., the company behind Gradle Build Tool, the popular open-source Java build automation system, and Gradle Enterprise, a leading solution for improving developer productivity, has announced the acquisition of Swiss-based software development technology provider Triplequote. The purpose of this acquisition, the company says, is to extend its developer productivity solution portfolio directly to the Scala developer community by speeding up builds in that language.

Because Scala is a rich language with lots of features running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), startup times for the scalac compiler are known to be slower. Java uses a javac compiler.

Triplequote's Hydra is a parallel compiler for Scala designed to speed up builds. "With Hydra, for the first time Gradle has a first-class developer productivity solution designed specifically to address the critical Scala developer community pain of unnecessarily slow builds," the company said.

"This acquisition puts us one step closer to our vision of providing a common productivity platform across all build systems and language ecosystems, so that one day all software code will be built with Gradle Enterprise," said Hans Dockter, CEO and co-founder of Gradle Inc., in a statement. "We look forward to the opportunity this acquisition affords to engage more directly with the Scala community in this endeavor."

The company also announced that Scala's creator, Martin Odersky, who has been serving on Triplequote's advisory board, will continue in a technical advisory role at Gradle.

"I think Gradle is a great fit for Triplequote because both companies are obsessed with finding ways to transform the developer experience and not just improve it incrementally," Odersky said in a statement. "It will be great for the Scala ecosystem to have the same level of DPE support that the rest of the JVM ecosystem enjoys."

Gradle Enterprise was designed to leverage acceleration technologies to speed up the software build and test process, as well as data analytics, to make troubleshooting more efficient. It is a key enabling technology for the emerging practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE).

Multi-build system support lies at the core of Gradle’s DPE strategy and vision, the company said in a statement. Both Gradle Enterprise and the Hydra Scala compiler currently support some of the most popular build systems including Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven, and Bazel.

"We started Triplequote late in 2016 with a mission to speed up Scala compilation times by tapping into the multi-core pool," said Triplequote CEO and co-founder Iulian Dragos, in a statement. "The open-source Scala compiler (like many others) is single-threaded, but most machines have plenty of cores that could be put to better use. I am satisfied that we delivered a working product that changed the daily lives of many developers by addressing their pain of slow Scala builds. Moreover, we showed that it was possible to significantly speed up the Scala compiler while maintaining 100% compatibility with the existing ecosystem of compiler plugins and macro libraries."

"We will continue to improve and expand acceleration technologies for Scala teams in our new home," Dragos added.

Gradle 8.0 was released on February 13, followed two days later some tweaks in version 8.01. The build tool was designed to support build automation across multiple languages and platforms including Java, Scala, Android, Kotlin, C/C++, and Groovy. It's integrated with several popular IDEs, including Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans.