Gradle vs Please: What are the differences?

1. Build Tool Type: Gradle is a build automation tool that focuses on flexibility and extensibility, allowing for customizations and diverse build scenarios, while Please is a build tool that emphasizes hermetic builds to ensure reproducibility and reliability in the build process.

2. Language Support: Gradle supports multiple languages and platforms, making it versatile for a wide range of projects, whereas Please is primarily designed for building software written in languages like Python, Java, Go, and C++.

3. Build Cache Functionality: Gradle offers a sophisticated build cache system that can significantly speed up build times by reusing outputs from previous builds, while Please also integrates a build cache mechanism but focuses more on ensuring reproducibility and avoiding caching non-hermetic dependencies.

4. Dependency Management: Gradle has a powerful dependency management system that can handle complex dependencies efficiently, with support for transitive dependencies and version conflicts resolution, while Please simplifies dependency management by using build rules that explicitly define dependencies and provide clear visibility into the dependency graph.

5. Community Support: Gradle has a large and active community with extensive documentation, plugins, and support resources available, making it easier to find solutions and leverage community-contributed plugins, whereas Please is a relatively newer tool with a smaller community, resulting in fewer plugins and community resources.

6. Integration with Bazel: Gradle can integrate with Bazel, another popular build tool, to leverage its advantages in scalability and performance for larger projects, while Please does not have direct integration with Bazel and operates as a standalone build tool.

In Summary, Gradle and Please differ in their build tool type, language support, build cache functionality, dependency management, community support, and integration with Bazel.