Gradle Release Notes

Upgrade instructions

Switch your build to use Gradle 8.4-rc-3 by updating your wrapper:

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=8.4-rc-3

See the Gradle 8.x upgrade guide to learn about deprecations, breaking changes and other considerations when upgrading to Gradle 8.4-rc-3.

For Java, Groovy, Kotlin and Android compatibility, see the full compatibility notes.

New features, performance, and usability improvements

Support for building projects with Java 21

Gradle now supports using Java 21 for compiling, testing, and starting other Java programs. This can be accomplished using toolchains.

Currently, you cannot run Gradle on Java 21 because Kotlin lacks support for JDK 21. However, support for running Gradle with Java 21 is expected in future versions.

Faster Java compilation on Windows

Gradle 8.3 made Java compilation faster, by keeping compiler daemons alive between builds. Gradle's internal performance tests show up to a 30% build time improvement for builds that are dominated by compiling Java sources. Until now, this optimization was only supported on Linux and macOS.

With this release, persistent Java compiler daemons are also supported on Windows. No configuration changes are required to enable this feature.

Easier to create role-focused Configurations

Gradle provides a flexible dependency management engine that allows build engineers and plugin authors to distinguish between the needs of consumers and producers. Configurations involved in dependency management can have three different distinct roles detailed in Resolvable and consumable configurations.

The ConfigurationContainer now exposes three concrete Configuration roles:

• Consumable - Models the outgoing variants of a project component.
• Resolvable - Acts as the root of a dependency graph.
• Dependency Scope - Collects dependencies, constraints, and exclude rules to be used by Consumable and Resolvable configurations.

Dependencies cannot be declared on configurations created with the consumable and resolvable factory methods.

Previously, the only way to specify a Configuration's role would be by mutating the canBeConsumed, canBeResolved, and canBeDeclared properties.

Now, new factory methods allow the container to create Configurations explicitly requesting one of these roles.

Build engineers and plugin authors can ensure that their Configurations are used only for their intended purpose since Configurations created using these factory methods cannot be mutated. A configuration with one role can never perform the functions of another.

Gradle core plugins will migrate their configurations to use role-locked configurations in Gradle 9.0. Furthermore, in future versions of Gradle, the ability to mutate roles or create Configurations without the factory methods will become increasingly restricted.

Code which previously used the mutable role properties:

configurations {
    create("implementation") { 
        isCanBeDeclared = true  // Defaults to true
        isCanBeResolved = false 
        isCanBeConsumed = false
    }
    create("runtimeClasspath") {
        isCanBeDeclared = false 
        isCanBeResolved = true  // Defaults to true
        isCanBeConsumed = false
        extendsFrom(configurations["implementation"]) 
    }
    create("runtimeElements") { 
        isCanBeDeclared = false 
        isCanBeResolved = false
        isCanBeConsumed = true  // Defaults to true
        extendsFrom(configurations["implementation"]) 
    }
}

May now use the factory methods:

configurations { 
    dependencyScope("implementation")
    resolvable("runtimeClasspath") {
        extendsFrom(configurations["implementation"]) 
    }
    consumable("runtimeElements") { 
        extendsFrom(configurations["implementation"]) 
    }
}

Kotlin DSL improvements

Gradle's Kotlin DSL provides an enhanced editing experience in supported IDEs compared to the traditional Groovy DSL — auto-completion, smart content assist, quick access to documentation, navigation to source, and context-aware refactoring.

The embedded Kotlin has been upgraded to 1.9.10

The embedded Kotlin has been updated from 1.9.0 to Kotlin 1.9.10.

Simple property assignment in Kotlin DSL

The simple property assignment with the = operator has been promoted to stable.

Links to GitHub sources in Kotlin DSL Reference

The Kotlin DSL Reference guide now contains links to the source code of all Kotlin and Java types, functions, and properties. The links point to GitHub and are specific to the version of the code the guide is documenting.

Other improvements

Memory settings of code quality tools for larger code bases

Gradle uses worker processes to run code quality tools like Checkstyle, CodeNarc, and PMD. On larger code bases, these workers can require more memory than what Gradle provides by default.

In this release, Gradle supports configuring the workers' minimum and maximum heap sizes on all code-quality tasks, so that larger projects can configure memory required to run their builds. These options are available on the different tasks for these tools.

Improved Checkstyle HTML report format

The default Checkstyle HTML report has been improved to show only the files with violations and correctly link to those files from the summary table.

The report also contains the version of Gradle and Checkstyle used to analyze the sources.

Introduce JetBrains as a known JVM vendor

It is now possible to use JetBrains as a known JVM vendor of Toolchains when referring to JetBrains Runtime when using :

java {
    toolchain { 
        languageVersion.set(JavaLanguageVersion.of(17))
        vendor.set(JvmVendorSpec.JETBRAINS)
    }
}

Filter method for Provider and Property

The filter method has been added to Provider and Property to allow filtering of a value.

val property = objects.property<String>()
property.set("foobar")
val matches = property.filter { it.contains("foo") } // still contains "foo"
val doesntMatch = property.filter { it.contains("baz") } // is empty

Note that filter is evaluated lazily, so the predicate is only evaluated when the value is queried.

Promoted features

Promoted features are features that were incubating in previous versions of Gradle but are now supported and subject to backwards compatibility. See the User Manual section on the “Feature Lifecycle” for more information.

The following are the features that have been promoted in this Gradle release.

Simple property assignment in Kotlin DSL is now stable

Gradle 8.1 introduced a simpler way to assign values to lazy property types in Kotlin scripts using the = operator instead of the set() method. This new assignment operator was enabled by default in 8.2 and in this release it is marked stable.

interface Extension {
    val description: Property<String>
}

// register "extension" with type Extension
extension {
    // Using the set() method call
    description.set("Hello Property")
    // Using lazy property assignment
    description = "Hello Property"
}

For more information, see Kotlin DSL Primer.

Fixed issues

Known issues

Known issues are problems that were discovered post release that are directly related to changes made in this release.

External contributions

We love getting contributions from the Gradle community. For information on contributing, please see gradle.org/contribute.

Reporting problems

If you find a problem with this release, please file a bug on GitHub Issues adhering to our issue guidelines. If you're not sure you're encountering a bug, please use the forum.

We hope you will build happiness with Gradle, and we look forward to your feedback via Twitter or on GitHub.