Add a post about whats inside gradle distribution

liutikas · Dec 19, 2024 · 1175662 · 1175662
1 parent b1d8360
commit 1175662
Show file tree

Hide file tree

Showing 4 changed files with 37 additions and 0 deletions.
diff --git a/_posts/2024-12-18-What-The-Distribution.md b/_posts/2024-12-18-What-The-Distribution.md
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title:  What The Distribution - What Is Inside Gradle Distribution Zips?
+header: header-eng
+---
+
+When I saw [this post](https://bsky.app/profile/goetas.com/post/3ldlafyd62c2s)
+
+![A BlueSky post asking why is Gradle ~200MB in size](/assets/2024-12-18-bluesky.png)
+I first giggled, but then honestly wanted to answer their question. How here it goes!
+
+Gradle has two flavors of distributions: `gradle-8.11.1-all.zip` and `gradle-8.11.1-bin.zip`, their
+respective compressed sizes are 219.4MB and 130MB, whereas uncompressed sizes are 455.3MB and 144.5MB.
+The difference between the two is `docs` (HTML/CSS/PDF/images for offline documentation) and `src` (all of Gradle sources),
+making it easy to tinker with Gradle entirely offline. Given that Gradle is kind of useless without the internet, stick
+to [Gradle docs website](https://docs.gradle.org/) and always use `-bin` version, your devs and CI will thank you!
+
+Now, if we dive into `gradle-8.11.1-bin.zip`, what's inside of that?
+![A screenshot showing libs, bin, init.d directories with their respective sizes](/assets/2024-12-18-gradle-bin.png)
+
+- `bin` contains a bash and Window batch file scripts to start Gradle
+- `init.d` is a directory that allows custom Gradle distributions to add `.gradle` init scripts and each one gets 
+executed at the start of the build.
+- `lib` is what takes pretty much the entire space with 311 `.jar` files.
+
+Let's dig into what we have inside of `lib`
+
+![A screenshot showing a list of files with their sizes inside of libs/ directory inside the zip](/assets/2024-12-18-libs.png)
+
+From here, we see that Kotlin compiler is 58.3MB (40% of the distribution), groovy compiler adds 8.1MB (5.6%).
+There are 166 `gradle-*.jar` files taking up 24.8MB (17%).
+
+That is a lot of space, and Gradle has been growing - `gradle-8.0-bin.zip` was 118.4MB, so 10% growth since
+February 2023.
+
+A sad side note, the Kotlin compiler that ships inside Gradle can only be used to compile `.gradle.kts` files, so
+if you try to build real Kotlin, you need to fetch a separate new copy through Kotlin Gradle Plugin!
diff --git a/assets/2024-12-18-bluesky.png b/assets/2024-12-18-bluesky.png
diff --git a/assets/2024-12-18-gradle-bin.png b/assets/2024-12-18-gradle-bin.png
diff --git a/assets/2024-12-18-libs.png b/assets/2024-12-18-libs.png