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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Gulp for a couple of months now, it's great! It's like Grunt, but faster, and the tasks are written in code, not a giant JSON config file.

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Even though they are clearly related, Gulp and Grunt are fulfilling different purposes. You should carefully examined your needs before choosing one over another.

I recently switched to Gulp for several projects, and I'm thinking of switching back to Grunt.

Gulp lacks of some important features. For instance, it does not allow to sequentially execute tasks: everything is done in parallel. This could for sure be emulated by using async, but the overhead is not worth it.

On the other side, Grunt does support sequential and parallel tasks execution, but is more verbose and does a lot of file writing on the disk (though it is relatively moderate).

One concrete example for sequential tasks execution (easily done with Grunt):

- Watch JavaScript files, when a modifications is detected:

  - lint files -> [JSHint, JSCS]

  - if success: launch tests -> [Karma, Mocha]

  - if success: notify

- If any failure occurs: notify and abort the sequence

> it does not allow to sequentially execute tasks: everything is done in parallel

There's a package[1] for Gulp which does exactly that.

[1]: https://www.npmjs.org/package/run-sequence

I didn't know about it! Thanks

We're adding the ability to handle sequential tasks (and other cool combinations) in Gulp 4. See bach[1] for some ideas.

[1]: https://github.com/phated/bach

I remember some discussions on Gulp's issues tracker where maintainers were reticent about integrating sequential tasks execution.

But that's great if you are going to do it. This may make me come around and give a second chance to Gulp.

There are ways, like others have said. There is also a callback system you can use to make things sequential, but last time I looked it wasn't well documented

There are always ways. But I find Grunt much more handy to do it.

"For instance, it does not allow to sequentially execute tasks: everything is done in parallel."

This is false. You can set perquisites for a task, which will be executed in sequence.

I think you are talking about this[1], indeed you are right.

However, task dependencies allows sequential tasks execution, but that's not very handy as you may want a same task to be executed in two different sequences.

Let's see a simple example on which I honestly struggle to reproduce with Gulp:

  [Lint, Test] -> Concatenation -> Minification

  Watch -> [Lint, Test] -> LiveReload

How would you do such a setup without having a redundancy in your tasks declaration?

[1]: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/recipes/runn...

The grunt config is javascript, not json. So you can write custom tasks code in your grunt config.

For instance, I wrote a custom tag to modify specific pages to inject javascript include statements in HTML pages. There is probably a plugin for that, but I was able to write the code in 15 minutes so I didn't care.

I use https://www.npmjs.org/package/gulp-inject to do it with gulp, works fine

I know it is, but the majority of the tasks are configured in one big hash.

Yeah, but it's also trivially easy to wrap a 3rd party task in your own task and munge the config at run time. (I'll admit that that pattern didn't become apparent to me until after using Grunt for some months, but once I saw you could do that, many things that seemed onerous got easier.)

Same here, have been using it for personal projects for a couple of months and it outperforms grunt by a long shot.

I agree! Also using it since a few months and couldn't go back to Grunt!

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