Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Why Mill Uses Scala for Build Configuration

2025-02-13

The choice of Scala as the configuration language for the Mill build system, instead of alternatives like YAML or XML, has raised questions. This article addresses this by exploring three key reasons: the benefits of using a general-purpose programming language, the specific advantages of Scala, and the rationale behind leveraging the Java Virtual Machine. While Scala is a niche language, its unique properties make it particularly well-suited for configuring build systems, regardless of project size.

(mill-build.org)

Development

Mill's Cross-Platform Native Binaries via Github Actions

2025-02-02

The Mill project leverages Github Actions to build native binaries on various platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and upload them to Maven Central. A clever configuration separates the publishing of JVM-compatible artifacts from platform-specific native binaries, ensuring cross-platform compatibility. Custom `artifactName` and `jar` tasks generate versioned files with OS and CPU architecture suffixes, allowing users to select the appropriate executable for their environment.

(mill-build.org)

Development Cross-platform Build Native Binaries

Mill JVM Build Tool: Directly Executable Assembly JARs

2025-01-02

Mill JVM build tool creates assembly JARs that are directly executable, eliminating the need for the `java -jar` command. This is achieved by prepending a shell script to the JAR file, which then invokes the Java runtime. This script is cleverly designed to be compatible with both Unix and Windows systems, enabling cross-platform executability. The article details how this works, leveraging the nature of ZIP files to concatenate a launcher script with the JAR contents for seamless execution. This significantly improves the integration of Java programs into command-line workflows.

(mill-build.org)

Development build tool

Faster CI with Mill: Selective Testing Strategies

2024-12-30

Running all tests in large codebases is inefficient. This article explores three selective testing approaches: folder-based, dependency-based, and heuristic-based. Folder-based is simple but may miss errors; dependency-based is more thorough but can over-test; heuristic-based optimizes test selection with custom rules, balancing speed and thoroughness. The Mill build tool natively supports dependency-based selective testing, significantly improving CI efficiency. However, combining it with heuristic methods further optimizes the balance between speed and test coverage.

(mill-build.org)

Development Selective Testing Mill Build Tool

Monorepo Build Tools: Scaling Your Codebase

2024-12-20

Traditional build tools struggle with large codebases (100-10,000 active developers). Monorepo build tools like Bazel and Mill offer solutions by supporting multiple languages, custom build tasks, automatic caching and parallelization, remote caching and execution, drastically improving build speed and efficiency. They also feature dependency-based test selection and build task sandboxing, reducing testing time and non-determinism. While these features might seem unnecessary for small projects, they are crucial for large-scale collaboration and continuous integration in larger projects, preventing build times from becoming a bottleneck.

(mill-build.org)

Development build tools scalability