What The Distribution - What Is Inside Gradle Distribution Zips?

When I saw this post

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 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?

• 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

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!