gulp VS Rollup

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.

In the Node.js ecosystem, bundling is typically handled by third-party tools rather than Node.js itself. Some of the most popular bundlers in the Node.js world include Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel, offering features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement.

📦 Rollup for bundling

Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup

Rollup is another popular JavaScript module bundler focusing on high performance. It excels at tree-shaking and uses ES module syntax to generate more performant bundles than traditional module bundlers. In addition to JavaScript, Rollup supports bundling CSS and JSON as well. Rollup has more than 12 million weekly NPM downloads.

Vite (read as vit) is actually a combination of two great frontend tools - an immensely fast development server and a build command for shipping heavily optimized static assets using Rollup. Many developers have encountered the process of setting up a project using Create React App. While CRA can be useful for beginners due to its simplicity and abstraction of configuration, it has some drawbacks that outweigh its benefits, particularly its tendency to be bloated. Don't get me wrong, Vite is opinionated as well, but it's highly extensible through its Plugin API.

As we iterate on the definition, we are going to want a better developer experience for rebuilding the package on changes. Typically, for a “library” or “utility” style package, I’d reach for either unbuild’s stub concept or use esbuild/tsup/rollup to implement a more traditional watch/rebuild, but in this case, I’m watching a proto file that lives outsides of the source, which breaks assumptions of those tools.

As we can see, we have two external dependencies and one internal tool. In the modern way of packaging our application, we would be of course required to package this project using some bundler like ESBuild or Rollup. But with import maps, we can instead utilize CDN's to deliver our packages and completely eliminate the bundling step.

Vite has a great plugin ecosystem because it leverages the same plugin interface as Rollup, meaning most Rollup plugins are also compatible with Vite. The Vite guide offers more reasons for why you might want to check out Vite.

Other popular build tools include Vite.js, Browserify, Rollup - The bundler behind vite.

Awhile back I wrote about packaging your JavaScript library code into a dual-module bundle (ESM + CommonJS) using Rollup module bundler. Make sure to check it out (it's been updated for Rollup v3!).