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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

My first thought for Perl 6 killerapp: a html5/js build replacement for grunt, gulp and other such monstrosities.

You can write a replacement for gulp in Perl 6, but if it doesn't have the plugins, who will use it?

Grunt and gulp have huge plugin ecosystems, which is both a blessing (you can find ready-made plugins for a lot of tasks) and a curse (everything moves very rapidly, plugins get abandoned, blacklisted and superseded all the time - if you want to compile TypeScript files, half the blogposts will recommend gulp-tsc .. but wait, it's been blacklisted, you should use gulp-typescript instead ).

Grunt: ~5400 plugins: http://gruntjs.com/plugins

Gulp: ~2000 plugins: http://gulpjs.com/plugins/

Gulp's list of blacklisted plugins: https://github.com/gulpjs/plugins/blob/master/src/blackList....

I personally like the idea of using good old Make for that task. You don't need "huge plugin ecosystem", you just need executables to use it. And unlike many other systems it does incremental builds without any special machinery.

That's a valid approach, but "Good old Make" is only good if you are already familiar with it (and its quirks). If you're a new-ish web developer, "learning Make" and "learning Gulp" are two equally foreign tasks.

Also think of your target audience. All of them can program in JavaScript more or less, not all of them will want to learn Perl to do something they can do without learning a new language.

How many of the plugins do you use and how many are overengineered for a simple purpose?

In a fairly simple project, I have these:

    gulp-autoprefixer -- CSS vendor prefixes
    gulp-concat -- concatenates multiple files into one
    gulp-cssmin -- CSS minifier
    gulp-imagemin -- image optimizer/minifier
    gulp-rename -- renames files produced by other streams
    gulp-ruby-sass -- transpiles SASS to CSS
    gulp-template -- interpolates some variables, e.g. environment settings or external dependency URLs, into a file (basically lodash's .template )
    gulp-typescript -- transpiles TypeScript to JS
    gulp-uglify -- JS minifier
    gulp-util -- provides things like access to environment variables, console.log replacement, Gulp-specific throwable errors
    gulp-watch -- automatically recompiles when source files change
    gulp.spritesmith -- converts images to CSS sprites

No need for a new DSL for js package management, most of the projects which use grunt/gulp should just be using npm package.json's scripts. If you need to do complex builds use a Makefile. The most established build DSL is bash and it still does the job better on most aspects than grunt/gulp.

grunt/gulp/etc. have better alternatives in many languages. The reason they're popular is they're written in javascript, so people working in javascript can have their build configured in the same language as the rest of their project.

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