Welcome back to a new post on thoughts-on-cpp.com. In today’s post, I would like to give an introduction to the build system Gradle and how we can use it to build native applications and libraries. Gradle is originally coming from the Java world, but it’s also supporting native build toolchains for quite a while. Gradle is becoming more and more popular in the Java world and is on a good way to rule out the old bull Maven. This is because of two features which we can also benefit from in the native (C/C++, Objective-C/C++, Assembly, and Windows resources) build world. These features are Gradle’s easy to maintain and very expressive Groovy (or Kotlin if preferred) based DSL, and it’s capabilities of dependency resolving via online and on-premise library providers (such as maven-central, Artifactory, Bintray, etc.) or local repositories.