Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#51

Post by jbergens » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 9:43 AM UTC

shadowmint wrote: post #28

jdp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> unsubstantiated FUD isn't necessary 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 scrip…

Great explanation of limitations of make. Regarding when someone says make i availible everywhere and forgets Windows I think we can start saying Javascript/Node is everywhere (not preinstalled but easily availible). It is probably more true.

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#52

Post by igl » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 9:51 AM UTC

I am very comfortable with make, my coworkers however are not. Every preprocessor comes with a command line interface, easily accessible and understood. The only useful feature of these build tools is hot reloading. `npm gaze` even provides a somewhat working fs.watch interface which works good across platforms.

I am not sure if that justifies 70mb of additional dependencies and the "we can solve that with a grunt plugin" mentality devs get. Our Gruntfile is 440 lines long :/

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#53

Post by igl » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 9:59 AM UTC

dahdum wrote: post #27

thesnider wrote: post #2

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.

Same here, a bunch of complex & dependent tasks all boiled down to a few commands run often, and a bunch more less so. I also use grunt-shell a great deal rather than find/write a new plugin, pretty decent way to call out to bash.

Show me one task in your Gruntfile that is complex. grunt-shell also just wraps child_process.spawn which is already trivial.

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#54

Post by niklasni1 » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:13 AM UTC

igl wrote: post #52

I am very comfortable with make, my coworkers however are not. Every preprocessor comes with a command line interface, easily accessible and understood. The only useful feature of these build tools is hot reloading. `npm gaze` even provides a somewhat working fs.watch interface which works good across platforms. I am not sure if that justifies 70mb of additional dependencies and the "we can solve that with a grunt pl…

I'm a novice-ish web developer with decent UNIX knowledge. For my latest Angular project which involved some CSS-preprocessing, I spent a few hours on learning the and setting up one of these tools.

Then I found out what it was actually doing, and replaced it with a small shellscript that NPM calls.

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#55

Post by Fannon » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:24 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #43

My vote is for bash scripts. If you are in Windows then you can use babun or preferably get off Windows.

babun looks really interesting. So far I've worked with PortableGit + ConEmu which works quite fine - just updating is not the nicest experience.

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#56

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:24 AM UTC

thesnider wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#57

Post by twfarland » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:24 AM UTC

thesnider wrote: post #2

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 just feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with '13 other things' in their build.

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#58

Post by fit2rule » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:31 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #49

Too wrote: post #19

I found all build systems for all platforms to be a total PITA and eventually i just resort to using a shell or python script to invoke the commands i want. With this method you can very easily add user promting (do you want to build debug or release?), database reporting of build and test results, source control integration etc. Whatever i learn here can be applied and reused for new things in the future instead of…

You cannot compare something like Maven/Gradle/SBT/Leiningen to Make. Make doesn't do incremental building and testing, it doesn't do test coverage reports, it doesn't download the dependencies for you, it doesn't build the Javadoc documentation for you, it does not package and publish your signed artifacts on Maven Central, it does not wrap your stuff in an OS specific installer, etc, etc... And you know, these thin…

>And you know, these things are standard stuff that one would like to do for every project

And its totally stupid, and the stupid persists, because 'its standard' now. This is how stupid stuff becomes standard - people say "hey, this stupid stuff - its standard now".

You're using the argument that its a good thing to have to do all of that stuff with one tool .. really? (Besides, Make can do all of that - you just have to configure it to do so, like any other tool..)

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#59

Post by fit2rule » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:32 AM UTC

dickeytk wrote: post #33

kenneth wrote: post #30

I simply use Make for all my web projects, whether it's a Ruby JSON API, or a React front-end. It's reliable, pre-installed everywhere, and can wrap anything in one consistent CLI. Why have to remember whether to type lein repl , pry , or rails console , when make repl will do everytime? Ditto, bundle install , npm install , lein deps => make deps . make server can easily wrap whatever command launches the server, ma…

keep in mind that make isn't going to work on Windows. For a lot of people, that's okay (including myself). Still, a ton of developers still work on Windows.

And its different for Windows users who want to use Grunt, how exactly?

Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp

#60

Post by xrstf » Tue, Dec 09, 2014, 10:44 AM UTC

fit2rule wrote: post #59

dickeytk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

keep in mind that make isn't going to work on Windows. For a lot of people, that's okay (including myself). Still, a ton of developers still work on Windows.

And its different for Windows users who want to use Grunt, how exactly?

It's different in the way that it's trivial to use npm to install grunt and run builds on Windows, but not trivial to get a Makefile to run (if you don't want to resort to running cygwin bashs all the time).