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Brunch vs gulp: What are the differences?
Developers describe Brunch as "Ultra-fast HTML5 build tool". Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology. On the other hand, gulp is detailed as "The streaming build system". Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.
Brunch and gulp belong to "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Brunch are:
- compiles your scripts, templates, styleslints them
- wraps the scripts and templates in common.js / AMD modules.concatenates scripts and styles
- generates source maps for concatenated filescopies assets and static files
On the other hand, gulp provides the following key features:
- By preferring code over configuration, gulp keeps simple things simple and makes complex tasks manageable.
- By harnessing the power of node's streams you get fast builds that don't write intermediary files to disk.
- gulp's strict plugin guidelines assure plugins stay simple and work the way you expect.
"Easy and awesome" is the primary reason why developers consider Brunch over the competitors, whereas "Build speed" was stated as the key factor in picking gulp.
Brunch and gulp are both open source tools. It seems that gulp with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.41K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Brunch with 6.58K GitHub stars and 461 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, gulp has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1163 company stacks & 705 developers stacks; compared to Brunch, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.
What is Brunch?
What is gulp?
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Why do developers choose Brunch?
Why do developers choose gulp?
- Build speed453
- Readable279
- Open source210
- Node streams175
- Intuitive107
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What are the cons of using Brunch?
What are the cons of using gulp?
What companies use Brunch?
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What tools integrate with Brunch?
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I use JavaScript these days and for few years I didn't have to use jQuery at all. I used to use it back in the days when IE8 and similar was a thing. But due to better browser support of native functions for DOM manipulation I could move to vanilla JavaScript. Most of the time, that's all I need to work with modals/accordions and similar. But I'm not saying that jQuery is bad. It was, and still is a great tool. Some of it's features are available in all browsers nowadays so it is not so important as it used to be. But jQuery has still advantage for example in it's selector engine, some DOM selections which are easy in jQuery are a bit more difficult in vanilla JS (you have to create some helper functions or use some 3rd party library to help you with that), but to be honest I needed this on very few occasions. So it really depends on your project (supported browses, plain JS or some bundling - gulp, Webpack, whether you plan to use modules etc.). Hope this helps.
Using Webpack is one of the best decision ever. I have used to Grunt and gulp previously, but the experience is not the same, and despite I know there are other bundlers like Parcel, Webpack gives me the perfect balance between automatization and configuration. The ecosystem of tools and loaders is amazing, and with WebPack #merge, you can modularize your build and define standard pieces to assemble different build configurations. I don't like processes where you cannot see their guts, and you have to trust in magic a little bit too much for my taste. But also I don't want to reinvent the wheel and lose too much time configuring my build processes. And of course, I love #WebPackDevServer and hot reloading.

Gulp is a new build system which shows a lot of promise. The use of streams and code-over-configuration makes for a simpler and more intuitive build. There isn't much boilerplate code so you're able to roll your own asset pipeline. Even if you don't know node.js streams, gulp is pretty readable and easier to understand.
PS: It's worth saying if you know Grunt then you can learn Gulp in a day.
Gulp is used as the build system for Cloudcraft.co with a lot of custom targets: vendoring dependencies, transpiling ES2015 to Ecmascript5 (with Babel), incremental compilation of multiple watched modules, minification, creation of app distribution packages etc. Having previously used Grunt, I've come to greatly prefer Gulp due to the ability to easily write my own tasks using plain JS without necessarily relying on plugins for everything.
gulp is used to package our plugins for the WSC (Woltlab Suite Core) in a fast, convenient and code-driven way. We enjoy the comfort it offers with stuff like the gzip-plugin or tar-packing.
For all our frontend site builds, Grunt allows us to do one-click builds for SASS, Coffeescript and other tools, with minifying and general restructuring built right in.
gulp is a fancy alternative to grunt (that we don't use anymore). Just use async/await instead of "stream" everything (which is a nonsens). We don't use gulp.
If a project has a more complex build, gulp allows us to build a flexible build pipeline and automatically rebuild on files changes. Speeds up JS development.