Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grunt 1.0.0 released

gruntjs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 106 posts

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#61

Post by laichzeit0 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #30
igl wrote: post #9

Obsolete before it hit 1.0. While grunt/gulp was fun for a while... i am not looking back to our 800 line grunt file, complicated async configuration and the tons of dev-dependencies. Webpack blew everything out of the water. 80 lines of config, hot-reloading, code-spliting, hash-filenames... Looking forward to whats coming next.

Grunt was nasty as hell, and clearly didn't learn any of the lessons from, say, proper Makefiles from the UNIX world over the past 30 years. Gulp is a looooot better, especially when I have things like Foundation 6's zurb-template, which is basically configured out of the box how I setup my Foundation 5 era projects. I don't care how big a Gulp file is if I'm not the one having to do major maintenance on it.

This is what I don't get.

Do authors of these build tools actually sit down for a couple of months looking at things like Makefiles that have been around forever, perhaps even Maven, etc. Take all these things together and go "This is what sucks in all of them, and here's how we can do it better" and still cater for all the use cases that these tools are brilliant at.

It's like there's no thought put into these tools and nothing is built on computer science foundations. Like why are you using Json as the syntax? Ant build files were an abomination and Json really isn't offering anything better (actually way less), except a slightly more readable syntax for trivial use cases.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#62

Post by kdamken »

vladikoff wrote: post #48

Hey! Core maintainer here. I see a lot of comments are basically saying our project is obsolete or sucks. That does not stop us from working on Grunt though. We are still seeing record download numbers, even with the 2 year old releases. This is why we felt it was important to keep releasing this software and supporting developers. For those who support and use Grunt - huge thank you! Pick up your free open-source co…

Thank you for your hard work! Don't listen to the haters. A lot of hackernews seems to be hipsters who dislike anything that's not the latest, most obscure technology to be using.

Grunt is solid, and does a great job at helping front end devs do their work. For people just getting into using a task runner, there are a lot of tutorials and S/O questions out there to help them learn as well.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#63

Post by oblio »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #61
DiabloD3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grunt was nasty as hell, and clearly didn't learn any of the lessons from, say, proper Makefiles from the UNIX world over the past 30 years. Gulp is a looooot better, especially when I have things like Foundation 6's zurb-template, which is basically configured out of the box how I setup my Foundation 5 era projects. I don't care how big a Gulp file is if I'm not the one having to do major maintenance on it.

This is what I don't get. Do authors of these build tools actually sit down for a couple of months looking at things like Makefiles that have been around forever, perhaps even Maven, etc. Take all these things together and go "This is what sucks in all of them, and here's how we can do it better" and still cater for all the use cases that these tools are brilliant at. It's like there's no thought put into these tools…

I think not even Node or NPM learned any lessons from older tools. Look at the recent leftpad fiasco. A decent part of it could have been avoided with namespacing (hello Maven groupIds!). npm didn't have it from day 1 and even now it's optional and basically unused.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#64

Post by andersevenrud »

vladikoff wrote: post #48

Hey! Core maintainer here. I see a lot of comments are basically saying our project is obsolete or sucks. That does not stop us from working on Grunt though. We are still seeing record download numbers, even with the 2 year old releases. This is why we felt it was important to keep releasing this software and supporting developers. For those who support and use Grunt - huge thank you! Pick up your free open-source co…

Thank you for making my life as a developer so much better.

I did not know about the "hate" before visiting this thread... and I don't get it and now feel a bit sad reading all this. I was using Makefiles, npm commands and custom scripts for quite a while, and they were a pain to maintain! With Grunt I can just throw in a couple of plugins and I'm good to go! I'm using it for more than just building my apps.. I do all configuration and generation of new source-files etc with it, and it is awesome.

<3

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#65

Post by DCoder »

moron4hire wrote: post #50

People keep saying "every grunt package makes its own way of doing things." I have not found that to be the case at all. Grunt has a lot of ways to specify groups of files, and many packages only show example usage for one of them, but they are actually largely interchangeable. I'm a little incensed at the speed of it. It is very slow, for no apparent reason. But now I'm also wondering if it's not grunt's fault and a…

The "file name too long" was an issue in npm v2, where each module installed its dependencies inside itself, recursively, leading to enormous node_modules/foo/node_modules/bar/node_modules/baz/node_modules/quux/node_modules/... chains.

npm v3 was an attempt to fix this so it now tries to install all modules and their dependencies in the top level directory, unless there's a version conflict, in which case it falls back to the old behaviour. npm v3 also got slower, because to fix the folder chains it changed how the packages are downloaded and installed.

It sounds like your node_modules were installed by npm v2 – you can try nuking your entire node_modules folder, ensuring you have npm v3, and letting it install your dependencies again. If your guess about grunt's performance problems is correct, this might improve your build experience.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#66

Post by igl »

amelius wrote: post #39
rkwz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Webpack is that if you want to do something that's not straightforward[1] or covered in the dozen tutorials that are on the web, you're going to have a hard time. The docs are very basic and there are so many configuration params. If you want to do something that's not covered in tutorials or boilerplates, be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time reading Webpack PRs, issues and the codebase.…

> The problem with Webpack is that if you want to do something that's not straightforward[1] or covered in the dozen tutorials that are on the web, you're going to have a hard time. I really hate systems that are built like that. Nobody should build software like that. I just want simple tools with a clear API that I can combine together and easily replace by other tools, like in the Unix tradition. I guess it is a c…

Webpack does not glob-search against the filesystem like grunt/gulp/brunch/broccoli/make. If you look for that: Sorry, webpack does not "replace" simple tools like that.

Think of it as a tool executing require.extensions at build time. It's not operating on files as much as it's looking directly at the source-code AST. That makes it more complex to get into over the glob tools but it's worth it.

It's also just as modular as anything else: http://npmsearch.com/?q=loader%20AND%20keywords:webpack

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#67

Post by splintercell »

uhtred wrote: post #46
igl wrote: post #9

Obsolete before it hit 1.0. While grunt/gulp was fun for a while... i am not looking back to our 800 line grunt file, complicated async configuration and the tons of dev-dependencies. Webpack blew everything out of the water. 80 lines of config, hot-reloading, code-spliting, hash-filenames... Looking forward to whats coming next.

Holy crap! I left a company 6 months ago and we were using Gulp there, and it was, as far as I am aware, the hot thing to use (I'm no front-end dev). Now you're telling me it is obsolete?! Javascript world is silly.

I am sorry but if someone told me that the product which came out yesterday is obsolete then I'd understand that Javascript world is silly, but if at your company a product which was popular 3 years ago cool, then it's your company's fault.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#68

Post by ArmandGrillet »

vladikoff wrote: post #48

Hey! Core maintainer here. I see a lot of comments are basically saying our project is obsolete or sucks. That does not stop us from working on Grunt though. We are still seeing record download numbers, even with the 2 year old releases. This is why we felt it was important to keep releasing this software and supporting developers. For those who support and use Grunt - huge thank you! Pick up your free open-source co…

Started using Grunt 2 years ago, still doing it: simple CLI, neat documentation, lot of plugins. Thank you for working on it, I don't know what are the current trends but Grunt is still doing its job perfectly for what I'm working on so I'll continue to use it.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#69

Post by petetnt »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #54
sakopov wrote: post #47

I don't see the hype behind build tools. I still use Grunt on just about any project because I can just copy/paste the entire build process from another project and never come back to it again. Don't see much point in switching to anything else.

Honestly there isn't much point. You can do the same stuff on grunt, gulp and apparently webpak. Personally, to avoid the extra mountain of dependencies, my newer projects just use scripts now to do building and I just simply reference the same depdencies grunt and all wrap. It's quite easy. Honestly there is some utility to using these build systems as they make it a tiny bit easier than just writing a script...but…

> my newer projects just use scripts now to do building and I just simply reference the same depdencies grunt and all wrap

Which is basically reinventing the wheel for the Xth time, but now with your spin on it. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against spinning a script or two for building, but as soon as you share them with others there might be some problems. Modern build systems have pretty thriving ecosystems which means less time doing stuff which is out of the development time. Thriving ecosystems mean that many are already familiar with the tools, which means less time for them to get a grasp of your project. And so on and so on. There are many benefits of using commonly used tools besides just running few simple or complex scripts.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#70

Post by reitanqild »

vladikoff wrote: post #48

Hey! Core maintainer here. I see a lot of comments are basically saying our project is obsolete or sucks. That does not stop us from working on Grunt though. We are still seeing record download numbers, even with the 2 year old releases. This is why we felt it was important to keep releasing this software and supporting developers. For those who support and use Grunt - huge thank you! Pick up your free open-source co…

I don't get node and npm (although I was good with JS), but you seem to be cool.

Noted. : )

Edit: again, now that we have a bunch of people capable of understanding trendy JS here: Care to share a link to somewhere I can learn?

Post reply on HN