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Comment by bavell | Hacker News Reader

Seeing gulp being used in the examples for the build step is strange... I wonder why it was chosen. Nothing wrong with it per se but gives me flashbacks to the horrors of my past exposure to it as an inexperienced webdev.

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I'd bet this was a "I already know this" decision, even as unnecessary as it is. I find it more bizarre that the tooling is written in TS, the WebAssembly source is Rust/C, and the test use file is plain JS. Some serious language personality disorder there. Some continuity would aid the DX here.

I only did one Gulp project and read it was a drastic improvement over Grunt, which I didn't use.

But most of my projects were done with Webpack and NPM scripts.

As much as people bemoan the complexity of Webpack, it's far superior to the (IMO) spaghetti code of gulp that inevitably results. I'll choose Webpack and npm scripts every time.

Today, I would probably choose something higher level than meddling around with Webpack directly.

Check out https://parceljs.org/.

It's how I start every project. I can always move to Webpack if I need more customization and complexity.

I was thinking about more integrated solutions like Next.js or Expo.

For smaller projects I agree. For larger projects, it's worth spending an hour or two on a custom Webpack config tuned to the project's needs IMO. In most cases it doesn't even take nearly that long.

Gulp is still widely used for more general build-related tasks like moving files around but sometimes you have a more complex build pipeline where you need to invoke bundlers/babel/etc via Gulp.

To move file around I use CopyWebpackPlugin or whatever other CLI tool called from npm scripts.

The promises of gulp (streams) fell short pretty quickly and we were just left with verbose spaghetti code that was no better than just a bash script. I went into gulp head first and honestly I’m glad that Webpack can deal with most of what I did back then, especially when paired with other reasonable CLI tools.

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