gulp VS FuseBox

Gulp - the streaming build system

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

GULP: Gulp is basically a task automation tool. The file that you create in this tool, is a plain JavaScript file that you can run to automate you menial tasks. It comes under the category of package manager. Gulp is very developer friendly and easy to learn. For more info: https://gulpjs.com/

[Gulp]:

With the pre-processors, you can shrink your CSS and increase reuse through variables. In almost all working cases, it will be an improvement above vanilla CSS. There are also implementations now, via PostCSS, that add vendor prefixes for you. The major drawback is, of course, that you have to compile your CSS beforehand; usually done via part of your tooling such as Grunt or Gulp.

As far as build tools go I remember how popular Grunt was when it was first released, then it was Gulp, and Babel came along to help you add new us features and get them working on older browsers.

At the time I had been exploring alternatives to Webpack like fuse-box, parcel, and esbuild. Around the same time I was made aware aware that browsers had already implemented [ESM modules], so technically as long as you produced HTML, CSS, and JS you didn't need any kind of pre-processing at all.

For this project, I've decided to give fuse-box a try and loved it. It's a very fast web bundler based on TypeScript. The only drawback was to install node-sass instead of the dart sass version I already have. Oh, well, it's just one useless module.