I'll never know.
Android is the only reason to have to put up with Gradle.
But, yes, is does use a lot of memory.
Eclipse and Netbeans compile on file save, can't get more continuous than that.
2GB for a cache that isn't required by alternatives for the same result just feels bad.
And don't get me started into turning build scripts into full blown applications impossible to decipher what is going on without some kind of debugging process.
Gradle is the worst allergic reaction to XML in history.
I understand not wanting to learn another build tool, but I have no regrets where I've moved to gradle. It's so much faster on a project of any size it's stunning.
90% of maven projects don't do anything terribly complicated. Porting them to gradle leaves them uncomplicated and unexciting. I just wish there was a standard release mechanism. Poor as mavene-release is, at least everybody uses it and understands it.
They don't stay uncomplicated though. Someone puts a quick one-liner hack in the build definition to fix some trivial issue they were having, and it never gets removed, and years later it bites you. I don't trust myself to remember and understand arbitrary code that I put in a build definition, yet alone anyone else.
