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Nitpick - Grunt is a task runner, Gulp and Brunch are build tools, Webpack is just a module bundler, it's not a full build tool - it's more a replacement for r.
by DCoder 11y ago
Nitpick - Grunt is a task runner, Gulp and Brunch are build tools, Webpack is just a module bundler, it's not a full build tool - it's more a replacement for r.js than for Gulp (and it's remarkably faster than r.js).
After trying out Grunt and Gulp, I found Gulp to be more to my liking because the tasks are written as actual JS code, not as a pile of configuration. Plus, it runs the tasks in parallel if they don't depend on each other, whereas Grunt defaults to running them sequentially.
- bphogan 11y agoSure but they all end up being used as a build tool. Webpack may be a module bundler, but it has hot reloading, live reloading, and plugins to transpile. Watch any React tutorial and the first thing they have you do is set up a Webpack config that gives you a live-reloading build system with ES2015. And it's a different one than the one I used 5 months ago. It's nice that there are people willing to address problems, but it would be nice for web development to grow out of its "oooh shiny" phase.
- DCoder 11y ago> Watch any React tutorial and the first thing they have you do is set up a Webpack config that gives you a live-reloading build system with ES2015. To be honest, I prefer learning by reading specs/documentation, tinkering and Google-ing specific bits, not by watching tutorials, so I did not know this. That's not ideal conceptually, but it does mean one less tool in the pipeline, which is not a bad thing for beginners. > it would be nice for web development to grow out of its "oooh shiny" phase. Absolutely. Just as long as it doesn't swing to the other extreme, like PHP does, where 12-year-old and deprecated techniques are still entrenched at the top of Google... :)