Grunt vs System.js

Overview

Grunt

Stacks8.8K

Followers5.6K

Votes697

GitHub Stars12.3K

Forks1.5K

System.js

Stacks28

Followers10

Votes2

GitHub Stars13.1K

Forks1.1K

Grunt vs System.js: What are the differences?

Developers describe Grunt as "The JavaScript Task Runner". The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort. On the other hand, System.js is detailed as "Dynamic ES module loader". It is a Universal Module Loader for JavaScript. If you've used RequireJs or a CommonJs bundler in the past, you have probably created modules.Configurable module loader enabling dynamic ES module workflows in browsers and NodeJS.

Grunt and System.js can be categorized as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.

Grunt and System.js are both open source tools. Grunt with 12K GitHub stars and 1.54K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than System.js with 9.75K GitHub stars and 852 GitHub forks.

Medium, Twitter, and Udemy are some of the popular companies that use Grunt, whereas System.js is used by Canopy, Compass Inc., and One Negócios. Grunt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1032 company stacks & 2441 developers stacks; compared to System.js, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Advice on Grunt, System.js

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grunt	System.js
The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.	It is a Universal Module Loader for JavaScript. If you've used RequireJs or a CommonJs bundler in the past, you have probably created modules.Configurable module loader enabling dynamic ES module workflows in browsers and NodeJS.
-	Compatibility with Webpack;Polyfills for Older Browsers;Loader Extensions
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.3K	GitHub Stars 13.1K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 8.8K	Stacks 28
Followers 5.6K	Followers 10
Votes 697	Votes 2
Pros & Cons
Pros 288 Configuration 176 Open source 166 Automation of minification and live reload 60 Great community 7 SASS compilation Cons 1 Poor mindshare/community support	Pros 1 Loads anything trough AMD with the right plugin 1 Great plugin system
Integrations
No integrations available	AngularJS Node.js jQuery

What are some alternatives to Grunt, System.js?

gulp

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.

Webpack

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

Vite

It is an opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES Module imports during dev and bundles it with Rollup for production.

Pingy CLI

Gulp and Grunt and other heavyweight build tools are great for complicated build workflows. Sometimes you want something simpler that doesn't take lots of configuration to get up and running. That's Pingy CLI.

Microbundle

Zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules, powered by Rollup.

Esbuild

It is an extremely fast JavaScript and CSS bundler and minifier. Current build tools for the web are 10-100x slower than they could be. The main goal of this project is to bring about a new era of build tool performance, and create an easy-to-use modern bundler along the way.

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