Working on multiple projects can require interacting with multiple versions of the Java language. Even within a single project different parts of the codebase may be fixed to a particular language level due to backward compatibility requirements. This means different versions of the same tools (a toolchain) must be installed and managed on each machine that builds the project.

A Java toolchain is a set of tools to build and run Java projects, which is usually provided by the environment via local JRE or JDK installations. Compile tasks may use javac as their compiler, test and exec tasks may use the java command while javadoc will be used to generate documentation.

By default, Gradle uses the same Java toolchain for running Gradle itself and building JVM projects. However, this may only sometimes be desirable. Building projects with different Java versions on different developer machines and CI servers may lead to unexpected issues. Additionally, you may want to build a project using a Java version that is not supported for running Gradle.

In order to improve reproducibility of the builds and make build requirements clearer, Gradle allows configuring toolchains on both project and task levels. You can also control the JVM used to run Gradle itself using the Daemon JVM criteria.