Seems less “dark secrets”, more “incremental compilation 101”
Furthermore, IntelliJ (as much as I love it) has a terrible live compilation story compared to eclipse. Eclipse recompiles affected project files while you type and propagates errors live. Harp on java where it's at least factual, (crufty stdlib, missing uints, type erasure..). Java is miles ahead what tooling and maturity of the ecosystem is concerned.
I'm not mainly a Java person, but I do sometimes pitch in here and there. We're using maven, and it's definitely not doing incremental compilation. I mentioned this was crazy to the Java guys and they said it was normal for maven...
(They're also in an IDE most of the time, so maybe they don't care so much.)
> Changes detected - recompiling the module!
> [INFO] Compiling 734 source files...
Perhaps we're doing something strange or dumb or somehow don't have incremental compilation turned on...
Setting the flag to false causes it to compile only changed files, but this will give incorrect results, for the reasons described in the Kotlin blog post.