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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> CoffeeScript includes a (very) simple build system similar to Make and Rake.

Arrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhh.....

Why do people insist on doing this feature creep nonsense? Just stop! The world doesn't need another build system. The fact that you personally don't understand make (or cmake, or autotools, or rake, or scons, or ant, or...) is not a good excuse for inflicting another one of these things on the rest of us.

Yes, I'm sure it meets the needs of the coffeescript project nicely. But what introducing it has actually done in build a brand new barrier to those who want to work on coffeescript. You're ghettoizing your project with this nonsense.

Also: just for the record, those "cakefile" examples look awful to me; modulo language syntax, it looks just like scons. Everyone who has ever tried to use it for something serious hates scons.

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Whoa there buddy, no need to stress. Just don't use it.

The only reason why `cake` exists is because at the time that CoffeeScript was first released, there wasn't a "standard" JavaScript build tool, and we wanted the "coffee-script" project to have as few dependencies as possible. Adding a simple way to expose functions to the command line made it possible for CoffeeScript to build itself, without relying on "make" (Windows), "jake" (very rare), or "rake" (a Ruby dependency).

Regarding your comment below -- it's definitely not going to grow. All it does is expose functions to the command-line. See a litany of "closed wontfix" tickets if you don't believe me ;)

Also -- and perhaps mainly -- releasing "coffee" and "cake" binaries together was too cute to resist.

This isn't new, CoffeeScript has included this for a while.

One thing to keep in mind is that Cake is tiny, the complete source shouldn't take more than a minute or 2 to read and understand[1] and is a nice example of CoffeeScript style.

[1]: http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/cake.html

You're right that it's not new in 1.6; I misread the page. It was new to me, however. And you're right that it's quite small, and easy to read.

Which allows me to pronounce that It's tiny because it's limited. What happens when the project bumps up against those limitations (parallel builds would be nice, or maybe default rules, or the ability to invoke and export environment variables to subprocesses, or...)? Will they abandon cake and move to a build system that already meets their more advanced needs?

Hell no. They'll add features. So the cake of 2019 will, assuming a still-robust coffeescript community, look a lot more like rake or ant or scons or cmake. It won't be tiny. It won't be easy to read. It will be yet another ridiculous build system.

The history of cake.coffee[1] suggests otherwise. It's been edited relatively few times since the initial checkin, mostly to make it compatible with node.js API changes, and sometimes to pare it down and simplify it. It was hardly touched at all in 2012. It is small and mindful of feature creep.

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/commits/master/sr...

It appears that running `cake` doesn't check to see if there have been changes since the previous build. I wouldn't use a build system that didn't at least have this essential feature.

Compiling a CoffeeScript project is so quick that it would only add complexity without benefit.

>Hell no. They'll add features. So the cake of 2019 will, assuming a still-robust coffeescript community, look a lot more like rake or ant or scons or cmake. It won't be tiny. It won't be easy to read. It will be yet another ridiculous build system.

Which you will be free not to use. Along with not using Coffeescript.

Cake is a nice little tool. It could be detached from CoffeeScript and turned into a separate module, but it isn't hurting anyone.

When you're writing a node.js or browser project it's good to write build scripts in a language not too far from the main one, and it has the advantage of being able to use the whole node.js module ecosystem.

Take a look at this build script: https://github.com/ryejs/rye/blob/master/Cakefile#L52-L79 using flour[1]. I don't think you can get more succinct than that with any other build system, and it's blazing fast thanks to asynchronous I/O.

[1] http://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour

Somebody pissed on your cornflakes?

>The world doesn't need another build system.

Oh, but it does. Maybe not this one, but it sure needs a new build system.

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