Build system migration to Gradle

[liutikas]

I was wondering if you'd be willing to take patches to convert this project's build system from maven to Gradle. It would drastically improve build performance, especially for incremental iteration locally. Additionally, it would have good native integration with Intellij IDE. If you are interested, I would create a fork, migrate the build, then we can do some sort of validation to make sure the build outputs are equivalent and then finally merge the conversion.

Looking forward to your response.