Gulp¶
We don't use it anymore
Gulp has a good idea: The usage of gulp-streams to automate build stuff. It is a lot of biolerplate however. We abandoned it as a result. Take a look at smartgulp, our small replacement that allows usage of gulp plugins in your own scripts without gulp.
Gulp is an awesome streaming build system built on nodejs. It utilizes node streams to deal with files in chunks. (Every file is one chunk).
The Positive¶
- A standard way of doing things
- Wide support by the community
- Easy to write and expandable
- Considerably easy on memory when handling thousands of files, since files move trough the pipeline at a complete maximum of 16 at one time. Only when a file/chunk leaves the pipeline a new one is picked up.
The Negative¶
- Tool sometimes seems stuck with an old inefiicient dependency tree
- Too much boilerplate: We usually like it maintainable and good by convention over configuration
Our Approach at Lossless¶
- We wrote a really lightweight gulp replacement called smartgulp
- We compose streams with our own smartstream that handles errors with feedback like a champ
- We take the pain out of plugins with our gulp-function plugins: With support for promises.