Architectury Loom vs Gradle

Architectury Loom is a free Gradle plugin for setting up development environments for Minecraft mods. It supports Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt, and is described as a ForgeGradle replacement based on FabricMC Loom. Developers can choose Yarn, Official Mojang Mappings, or MCP mappings. Loom uses Fernflower and CFR to generate source code with comments. The documented IDE support is IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code; other IDEs are not tested or supported. The project requires Gradle 8.1 or newer and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its documentation labels the project experimental and says issues may arise, with reports directed to the issue tracker. The repository uses the MIT license, and community discussion is available through Discord. The latest listed release is 1.17, which includes an API for converting access wideners to access transformers for Forge and NeoForge.

Gradle Build Tool is a free, open-source system for automating software builds across projects of different types and sizes. Build logic can use either Kotlin DSL or Groovy DSL. Incremental builds, caching and parallel task execution support the build process, while Gradle downloads and manages transitive dependencies from Maven- and Ivy-compatible repositories. The Gradle Wrapper can provision a build environment and specify the Gradle version used by a project. Its ecosystem covers JVM, Android, C/C++, Swift, Objective-C and assembler projects, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The Tooling API lets IDEs and other tools inspect projects, run builds, receive progress events and cancel operations. Listed support includes Android Studio and Ant, plus Checkstyle, CodeNarc, PMD and JaCoCo. Gradle includes dependency verification. The maker says open-source security fixes are limited by its end-of-life policy; its Security Subscription offers prioritized fixes under SLA and extended maintenance, but does not guarantee a clean scanner report when findings come from third-party libraries.