Grunt

This item was not updated in last three versions of the Radar. Should it have appeared in one of the more recent editions, there is a good chance it remains pertinent. However, if the item dates back further, its relevance may have diminished and our current evaluation could vary. Regrettably, our capacity to consistently revisit items from past Radar editions is limited.

Nov 2019

Hold

Grunt is a JavaScript task runner that automates repetitive tasks. While Grunt served us well for a good amount of projects, other alternatives such as Gulp emerged in the meantime and proved to be a better pick for the majority of our teams.

We have two main reasons for discarding Grunt in favor of other tools:

Speed

If a decent amount of tasks is reached, Grunt is known to run slower than other tools, because it heavily relies on I/O operations and always stores the result of one task as files on the disk.

Configuration

On large projects where a lot of automation is required, it can get very tedious to maintain complex and parallel running tasks. The grunt configuration files sometimes simply don´t gave us the flexibility that we needed.

Currently, our preferred way to go is either simply use npm scripts or rely on Webpack loaders for file preprocessing. For non-webpack projects we also utilize Gulp.