The API documentation tells something else as well “Support for building native binaries is currently incubating. Please be aware that the DSL, APIs and other configuration may change in later Gradle versions.”
It’s incubating, which means the DSL may change between minor releases.
Gradle has had support for C/C++ for a long time (since 1.0), but it’s an area we’ve been working. This year we added:
Support for Google Test
Support for Precompiled headers
Support for parallel native compilation
Improved incremental build support
So, I’d say it works, but it’s not feature complete. You can build real things with it, but you might have to do more work than we think you should have to.
We’re always interested in real world feedback from people who try it out.
I can provide you a really great feedback, since in one of the project after migration we see around 5 times speed improvement comparing to the solution based on GNU Make. I’ve asked a question about plugin’s statement, since we don’t want to stack on the system which wouldn’t be maintain and supported in the near future.
You mentioned that it’s not feature completed, is there a list of coming features in native plugin?
There’s not a specific list. In general, we have a Roadmap and lots of design docs.
Variant-aware dependency management is a big focus (not just for native), so you can express dependencies on different variations of the same component. For Java, that might be the JDK9 vs JDK6. For native builds, that might be ‘debug’ vs ‘release’.
I don’t see us dropping support or maintenance in the near future.