You have wrong level of abstraction here. By incremental builds we mean builds done in development for the developer to see results and not clean full builds.

You’re splitting hairs by saying that the true incremental builds are Eclipse JDT delta compilations vs ant/maven javac incremental builds. Invoke ant on a source tree, change one file and reinvoke. Only one new file will be compiled (unless the referenced .class files also need compilation).

Ant is said to break the the “incremental” (or the IDE) compiler because once you use command line compilation + IDE compilation you get into trouble. JDT and javac compile enums for example differently, anonymous inner classes can have different numbering scheme, compilation errors can be compiled into runtime exceptions vs not compiling at all. This is the sad story of using 2 compilers and one output path. You run into problems.

We don’t advocate any specific build tool. We like the shortest turnaround possible and the best tools for the specific job. For this survey we tried to cover as many tools as possible.

You must be joking. An incremental compiler, such as the one in the Eclipse IDE compiles in the background in response to a code modification. Rarely is a complete rebuild necessary, that is, unless you have filled your IDE with lots of crap like Maven, which this website seems to be trying to promote.

Ant is by definition not “incremental”. Why don’t you go back to school, or learn VB?

Building your single super ant project is slower than building a single maven project/module. However, building all maven projects/modules is slower to building that single super ant project.