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The streaming build system

gulpjs.com

28 pointsstevewilhelm10 comments

Gulp is an interesting idea, but I'm skeptical of its long-term viability. As Wintamute said in another thread, large projects have a lot of needs, and streaming isn't enough for all (most?) of them. Gulp's creators were pretty adamant about not supporting other use cases when this came up on Twitter. [1]

Another issue with Gulp is that it's highly concurrent. Although that seems like a nice idea for speed, I suspect it will lead to a lot of hard-to-write and hard-to-debug edge cases. I've already heard reports of people getting strange behavior from their Gulpfiles [2].

At this point, I'd take a "wait and see" approach with Gulp unless you like playing with build tools or if you really need its focus on speed. If you're looking for a good build tool for that lets you "just run JavaScript," I'd check out Jake [3] instead. And of course, Grunt [4] is the current leader for JS builds, thanks to its immense plugin library.

If you're interested in a more in-depth review of Gulp, I have one here: [5]

[1] The Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/funkytek/status/423762923421302784

[2] Somebody runs into strange behavior from Gulp: http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/1v4tez/bottom_li...

[3] Jake: https://github.com/mde/jake

[4] Grunt: http://gruntjs.com/

[5] My Gulp review: http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/lab/1#comment-...

Developers seem to be separated into two camps, those that want scripting in their build system and those that work on large projects.

I'm a bit curious, why would those goals be at odds? Is there a specific reason build systems like this don't scale well? I'm genuinely curious, not having had much experience with larger projects.

I'm not certain how use of a "proper scripting language" is much different than using automake, cmake, ant / maven ... in what ways are these necessarily different from something like gulp.js, other than syntax? Does the introduction of extra language features have a negative impact in scalability implicitly?

Also most automake is a combination of automake and shell (sometimes it's hard to tell which is which).

In a large complex project build scripts tend to take on many tasks, and some of them will not necessarily fit into the pattern of taking in a stream of file globs, modifying them and piping them on into the next task. For example your script might manage a Git repo, deploy an app to Heroku, rsync some files somewhere, run some tests in a headless browser etc. So a build system that's optimised around streams, and one that you have to script by hand, might be very well suited for small streamlined projects but once things get varied and complex it might better be better to define your tasks via configuration instead of code, i.e. Grunt.

Not sure I follow this comment. But anything non-trivial needs some sort of scripting. Take ant for example, it started out as a pure declarative build system that worked ok for simple things. Then complexity reared its ugly head - needed loops and conditionals and the tool mutated into the awful beast it is today. So I think you have it backwards.

That is one way to do things, I think the wrong way. If you need something more sophisticated your build system should have a way to write code that is testable and then used declaratively in your build. The answer should not be scripting in your build file.

Check out this article for a comparison with Grunt and npm run.

http://blog.ponyfoo.com/2014/01/09/gulp-grunt-whatever

it reminds me of grunt, with a couple of plugins, or I didn't get the point.

Yes, Gulp performs the same tasks as grunt. However I switched to gulp after trying it because:

Gulp's simpler - my old 47 line grunt file became a 23 line gulp file.

Also you don't expose useless targets, eg in grunt I have 'grunt less', but I have to tell people not to run that task , as I also use auto prefixer and can't make grunt less automatically run auto prefixer - if they run 'grunt less', they'll produce unusable code.

There are other reasons too - gulp was developed after grunt, so it does some things similarly and other things much differently http://slid.es/contra/gulp

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