i think you’re right, though i think i was thinking about about this at a higher level. i more meant that the languages in the JVM ecosystem I have experience with (java, kotlin, and scala) have all given me similar unpleasant experiences building them. same tools too, though you probably wouldn’t use sbt for non-scala projects even though you could.

the main pain points for me are dependencies, packaging, and configuration. best i can tell, those pains are shared between anything that targets JVM, especially those that want to have good interop.