Grunt is not a great build tool. It's not terrible, either, but it puts too much emphasis on a giant declarative config object.

But Grunt has a huge library of plugins that cover all your build automation needs, and that's made it the de-facto standard for build automation in the JavaScript world.

I'm working on a universal build format that would allow you bring the convenience of Grunt plugins to other tools as well. (I'm fond of Jake, myself.) PM me or follow my Github [1] for more. The first version's going up next week.

[1] https://github.com/jamesshore/

I am wondering the same thing. I would imagine that if your whole stack (especially build system) is built ontop of javascript you could have a level of meta programming via esprima, but the rest is bla