The Gradle team is pleased to announce the release of Gradle 4.1.
First and foremost, we are excited to announce the new Worker API for Gradle plugins, which facilitates safe parallel execution. We encourage plugin authors to read the new user guide section and implement tasks using this API because it provides parallel execution by default. Core plugins will adopt this API in future releases. Furthermore, the Gradle plugin for Android 3.0 alpha has already adopted this API, so plugin developers will be in good company. More details are given below.
This release supports running Gradle on the most recent JDK 9 release (b170+). Read our guide to building Java 9 modules to learn how to produce and consume Java 9 modules with Gradle.
Steady progress has been made to make the build cache more user-friendly. Remote build cache results are mirrored locally and build cache resolution failures no longer fail the build.
Included in this release, Gradle Kotlin DSL v0.10.3 comes with the latest Kotlin release (1.1.3), a new kotlin-dsl plugin for Gradle Plugins written in Kotlin, plus many improvements to usability, stability, and performance.
We've also spent some time making composite builds work more like multi-project builds. Included builds are now executed in parallel by default and Gradle avoids executing included build tasks multiple times when possible. Finally, you can now use --continuous build and composite builds together.
Scala enthusiasts rejoice! Scala compile and Scaladoc tasks now support Gradle's build cache. Zinc has been also upgraded to v0.3.15, which has preliminary support for compiling Scala using Java 9.
Finally, the CLI now shows more detail about tests in-progress, showing which tests are running in parallel.