Though both Gradle and Ant has a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of tasks in its execution plan, Gradle has made many improvements and are still looking for improvements and innovations like in memory DAG, parallel execution of discrete paths etc. Also, since Ant’s default tasks are available to every Gradle build, there is no need for any additional plugin-in here. Note that if you use the –q option while executing the task, you won’t see the ant echo messages. Gradle can even be considered as a Groovy-based Ant.

Gradle also ships with a full copy of Ant, thus making Ant’s default tasks available to every Gradle build. This might be required for leveraging an existing investment in Apache Ant in cases such as the overall project has moved to Gradle, but there is not enough time to move all existing ant setup to Gradle or to partly migrate from Ant to Gradle step by step. and Gradle makes this possible partly by leveraging Groovy’s AntBuilder functionality. You can integrate and call your existing ant tasks from Gradle as simple as calling ant. One of the features of Gradle that I like the most is its ability to interoperate with other popular build tools such as ANT and MAVEN.

Apache ant interview questions