Dagger has always been a collaboration between Google and Square. Both companies are heavily invested in Guice (and Bob!), and eager to see our code become faster & easier to use.
Dagger 1.0 was born in Square Register for Android. We’d been using a lot of Guice, and had run into performance problems. Our goal was to build something that does fewer things and runs faster.
It worked. We built a simple runtime that worked with either reflection (for interactive development) and code-gen (for deployment).
Dagger 2 is being developed at Google. They're working in bigger code bases (web services!) and want something faster, particularly for graph building. So they've built something that does even fewer things and runs even faster.
Googlers Gregory Kick and Christian Gruber have done a fantastic job. The Dagger 2 generated code is so simple! For the full rundown, see Greg's talk, Dagger 2, A New Type of Dependency Injection. My favorite part is the auto principal for generating code:
- Constrain the problem.
- Generate the only reasonable implementation.
I'm eager for Dagger 2. Stab me plenty.