Basically every Android conference has a set of talks on how to make Gradle perform in usable ways, including setting up the background daemon to use as much RAM as it can, RAM disks, SSDs.
Tricks that Maven, or the other build systems never required.
Well, in all fairness I switched from Maven to Gradle exactly due to low performance. Gradle gave my projects a boost of 3 to 7 times faster build speeds. RAM is not an issue for my setups, although I can’t recall how Maven held there against Gradle.
Buck looks quite interesting. Thanks for pointing it out!
Tricks that Maven, or the other build systems never required.