Gradle tracks the state of each piece and transitions each piece through its lifecycle as the build runs.

A central part of the Gradle architecture is the "build state model", which holds the state for each piece and coordinates state transitions and other mutations. 
Most source code in Gradle is arranged by which part(s) of the build state model it acts on.
This affects the lifecycle of the code and the set of services available for dependency injection.

# Gradle runtimes

Gradle is made up of the following processes that work together to "run the build":

- Gradle daemon. This is the process that actually runs the build. It hosts build logic and coordinates the lifecycle of the build. It is a long-running daemon process.
- CLI client. This is the `gradle` or `gradlew` command, and is responsible for locating, starting and interacting with the Gradle daemon, potentially downloading the Gradle distribution.