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Gradle handles 400+ subprojects, my last job had one project with about 400 of them combined with a silly mess of internal dependencies

Can I somehow programatically add sub-projects to a Gradle project? Or does each sub-project need to have

gradle.build

file?

Sure, the settings is pretty flexible, you could iterate over the projects and include them, see https://docs.gradle.org/current/javadoc/org/gradle/api/initialization/Settings.html for more of what you can do. And while you don't need a

build.gradle

file, why not put the build logic into a convention plugin and then script the initial setup? Each

build.gradle

would then only apply the convention plugin

Maybe you could start just by splitting packages in smaller number of projects, e.g. in 10 projects (so it’s not 1:1), since there is also some cost of setting up a compiler. So if you have a lot of packages with small number of classes it could be faster if they are compiled at once. Also maybe check how to increase memory of a Kotlin daemon: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/gradle.html#setting-kotlin-daemon-s-jvm-arguments. Additionally to that Kotlin also has an incremental compilation that might help you, when doing small changes (it’s not yet stable though): https://kotlinlang.org/docs/gradle.html#a-new-approach-to-incremental-compilation.

you may also be able to enable threading within the Kotlin compiler: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-46085/Support-experimental-parallel-compilation-of-a-single-module-in-the-JVM-backend