Gulp: The streaming build system | Hacker News Reader

Gulp: The streaming build system

github.com

29 pointsbenatkin7 comments

I've been using gulp instead of grunt on a few projects. Gulp is literally analogous to using pipes and redirection on the command line but you do it using javascript. If you need more than that you might need grunt or some other build tool. But this simplicity makes the build process much more straight forward and easier to explain to others.

Just (extremely curious): what's new about this new build system (except the Node.js dependency)?

It looks mainly to be pitched as an alternative to Grunt, the current main (I think?) Node.js build tool. And its primary feature seems to be that you don't have to figure out where your intermediate build products go. Beyond that, who knows.

(Grunt, incidentally, strikes me as a system that has learned nothing at all from decades of other build tools. It's about one step better than piping globs to unix commands.)

You can check out the slides for a more comprehensive overview of this vs. grunt

http://slid.es/contra/gulp

It's intended for people that are building web stuff with node. So they're already writing everything in Javascript and already have a dependency on node, so using node for their build process eliminates a dependency on Make or whatever.

The incumbent in this niche is Grunt. Grunt has a rich ecosystem of plugins, but it's complex, difficult to configure and difficult to debug. Gulp is meant to be simpler and therefor easier to use.

Gulp is not meant to compete with Make, Maven or the like.

What are the advantages of this (or `grunt') over `make'? Being JavaScript-based makes it more accessible than `make' but also ties it to just one language. What am I missing?

The main argument I've seen to use something in the Node ecosystem over make is that it works on windows machines. With Microsoft building support for Node into IIS it's something to consider.

Personally the thing I would consider is that I have javascript at my disposal rather than make. If you have the background to support make, more power to you. I do not have prior make file experience so it doesn't get me much.

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