21–30 of 108 posts
While we're at the subject, might I suggest using webpack instead of browserify? It's roughly the same, but less buggy.
Grunt and Gulp kinda create a siloed set of tasks that are annoying to run in-line with the rest of the node application (different contexts). I never think I'm going to run into it until I somehow run into a situation where I want to run or re-run a specific task on an application that is already deployed. To do so now I have to install grunt in a production system and restart the application...or I simply code up my tasks into reusable bits of JavaScript that the normal application can use plus I can use npm to run them under normal conditions.
Honestly Grunt does help get things going really quickly but there are a lot of immature things about it and Gulp.
a) I wanted to use simple shell commands, like cp and mv. b) Instead of trying to learn how to use a plugin, it's often easier to just write a few lines of code. c) Wanted to use async goodness with generators. d)The important task the build library does is "watching".
Couple of example build scripts:
1) https://github.com/jeswin/fora/blob/master/server/build-conf...
2) https://github.com/jeswin/fora/blob/master/www-client/build-...
Why don't people just use make?
Make has really horrific syntax and semantics, and doesn't integrate as nicely if you're dedicated to JavaScript. I mean, the Unix philosophy is about small programs that work together, not "only use old Unix tools". I'm reminded of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
This article seems super weird -- do people actually use Grunt/Gulp to run a single command at a time? Most uses that I've encountered are along the lines of 'we've got this huge build process involving compass, sass, uglify, ng-annotate, and 13 other things', and Grunt/Gulp allow you to do the whole thing, automatically re-running on file changes, with a single command.
I also use grunt-shell a great deal rather than find/write a new plugin, pretty decent way to call out to bash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make has really horrific syntax and semantics, and doesn't integrate as nicely if you're dedicated to JavaScript. I mean, the Unix philosophy is about small programs that work together, not "only use old Unix tools". I'm reminded of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
The "horrific syntax and semantics" claim seems pretty drive-by, the variables and some function names might be arcane, but newer releases have nicer aliases for those who care for them. I don't know what is so horrific about the semantics though, they are pretty straightforward. A Makefile is a set of rules, each rule being a target file, its dependencies, and the recipe to turn the dependencies into the target. Mak…
Sure.
...but to be fair, regardless of the make syntax, you've also got to look at the history of make, and what it's designed to achieve.
Make is for executing shell commands on file patterns with dependency rules.
It's not designed to use an ecosystem of plugins or have long running processes (eg. to run a local server or watch for file changes). It's not designed to be a scripting language (although it can be, since it's technically turing complete).
Now, when you look at other things which have come along to replace make as a build tool: cmake, grunt, gulp, ant, rake, maven, scons, premake, etc.
I think it's probably a little bit superscillious to suggest that all the people building these tools were just too retarded to realize how good make was.
More likely, they had specific needs that make didn't address.
Rust, for example, just recently had a reasonable make based solution, but they decided to depreciate it in favour of cargo, because it was simply too difficult to support in an appropriate cross platform manner.
Make isn't a bad tool; for very doing some specific things. Specifically building c code on unix-ish systems.
Is it the right tool for fetching the dependencies of and invoking a large set of ruby/javascript/python scripts and plugins to build the assets for a website, running a local development server and watching file changes and pushing livereload changes to the browser as the files change?
No. Make is absolutely rubbish at doing those things.
...not because make is rubbish, but because it's not for doing those sorts of things.
Why don't people just use make?