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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good writeup and I really appreciate the bit at the end about pull requests and issues as I do feel that developers should stay on top of their communities. That said, I like the mixin syntax of Less better and my favorite project Bootstrap uses Less, so I'll stick with Less.

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Agreed on the syntax, but for me the bigger issue that keeps me with LESS is that I have no interest in using a Ruby project for something integral to my build process because then I can't hack at it without a bottle of antacid. I don't work in Ruby and I have a strong desire not to; on the other hand, while I don't claim to like it, I'm quite comfortable with JavaScript and can work with LESS's code if I need to (and it has come up in the past).

This is one the reasons Hampton Catlin (the original author of Sass) created libsass, a port of Sass to C for portability. Check it out: https://github.com/hcatlin/libsass

Huh, never saw this! And it does seem to support SCSS (I don't like the SASS style at all). I'll have to take a look at this more closely.

Thanks!

Is it safe to assume that this compiles CSS much faster than the original?

After some brief testing: definitely. Faster than LESS by a good bit, too.

I'm not sure I'm going to use it, because of the compiled dependency (I'm on a Scala/Vert.x stack and I like being able to just check it out and hit "go"), but it's at least a practical option for me and I'm glad it exists.

Who cares if it's written in Ruby? You never have to see a single line of Ruby code to use it.

Did you actually read my post before replying? I much prefer to be able to, if necessary, work with the tools in my build process at a code level. I don't enjoy working with tools I don't have mastery over wherever possible (pgsql is a stretch, but I can hack on nginx, Play, LESS, and Redis without much difficulty).

I have on occasion had reasons to be mucking around in the LESS codebase. I cannot do that with SASS (well, I could, but I'd have to use Ruby and that's a non-starter for me).

There are sass ports of bootstrap, specifically the compass_twitter_bootstrap gem. I've been switching my projects over to this since discovering it.

Same here, Bootstrap has a ton of momentum and the mixins abstract away worrying too much about the vendor prefixing stuff anyhow.

Horses for courses, the real story is that these pre-processors are getting serious traction.

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