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> It makes me think of how webpack won the builder/packer battle against gulp and grunt by assuming you're building a web app, and want typical web stuff. But.
by joepie91_ 9y ago
> It makes me think of how webpack won the builder/packer battle against gulp and grunt by assuming you're building a web app, and want typical web stuff.
But... it didn't. Webpack and Gulp/Grunt aren't even the same category of tool; on a real-world project, you're exceedingly likely to use a build runner like Gulp/Grunt with Webpack (or Browserify).
Webpack is fundamentally a module bundler for non-CommonJS environments; it's not a general-purpose build tool, and isn't really suitable for glueing together any tools that don't directly relate to your browser-targeted bundle. In some projects that's all you need, but that doesn't mean it has somehow "won" from generic build tools - it just tries to solve a different problem.
- Klathmon 9y agoWebpack is a linker
- joepie91_ 9y agoSort of kind of, and in that analogy Gulp/Grunt would be equivalent to `make`. But unlike a typical linker, Webpack can invoke 'compilers' itself for the code it's bundling/linking - which is where the confusion around this topic comes from.
- skrebbel 9y agoUsing gulp with webpack means you can't use webpack incremental builds. Why would anyone want that?
- joepie91_ 9y agoWhy can't you? Gulp would typically only be responsible for starting the Webpack task (in watch mode), not for re-running it on every input change.