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in practice there’s no difference, they’re both fancy ways of fetching an element from a <https://docs.gradle.org/current/javadoc/org/gradle/api/NamedDomainObjectContainer.html|NamedDomainObjectContainer>

if you dig through the source you’ll eventually see that both effectively do this:

```sourceSets.named&lt;org.gradle.api.tasks.SourceSet&gt;("main")```
the only difference _might_ have an impact is the second one requires the <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/kotlin_dsl.html#type-safe-accessors|type-safe model accessors> are present, which is only true in `build.gradle.kts` files (or precompiled plugin scripts)

okay, perfect. thanks for digging :slightly_smiling_face:

they're not equivalent in other ways:
```val main by getting
main.java...```
is equivalent to
```getByName("main").java...```
which is eager,
```main { java... }```
is equivalent to
```named("main") { java... }```
which is lazy

if you used
```val main by existing
main.configure { java... }```
then that would be lazy

doesn't make a practical difference for `sourceSets` but it can for other types of object collections