When comparing Pint vs Yarn, the Slant community recommends Yarn for most people. In the question“What are the best Node.js build systems / task runners?” Yarn is ranked 4th while Pint is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Yarn is:
One of the most important aspects of Yarn is determinism (predictability). The lock file ensures that the same dependencies will always be installed in the same way and order regardless of the machine for a given repository.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Uncertainties integration
Transparently handles calculations with quantities with uncertainties (like 3.14±0.01) meter via the uncertainties package.
Pro Supports both Python 2 and Python 3
A single codebase that runs unchanged in Python 2.7+ and Python 3.0+.
Pro NumPy compatibility
It supports a lot of numpy mathematical operations without monkey patching or wrapping numpy.
Pro Supports any numerical type
Supports fraction, float, decimal, numpy.ndarray, etc.
Pro Uses jobs to prevent bloated build files
Using Grunt in complex projects can lead to extremely bloated build files. Pint resolves this issue by introducing Jobs, a job is basically a set of Grunt tasks that are related to a particular build step. Using this method the build code remains organized in different job files, for example one for js compilation and one for CSS preprocessing. When the build process is started, Pint starts running these job files which in turn build the project.
Here's a sample Pintfile.js
further demonstrating the concept of jobs in PintJS.
Pro Faster builds with built-in concurrency
Every job in a build process may depend on something before it. A simple example would be copying of the minified files to the dist directory, this task needs to be performed after the compilation is complete. What Pint does is that it lets the user declare the dependencies within each job in a dependsOn
array. Hence whenever PintJS starts the build process it first generates an internal dependency model so that the build could be parallelized by spawning up new Grunt processes wherever possible resulting in the complete build process being concurrent (and really fast!).
Pro Takes advantage of Grunt's huge plugin ecosystem
Pint is built on Grunt, so it can use Grunt's plugins. Grunt has a plugin for pretty much any need with over 4000 plugins currently available.
Pro Simplified build lifecycle
In some projects there are tasks that aren't related to the build at all. These can be simple tasks such as pulling the GIT SHA or reading the package.json file into variables. With Pint these additional tasks can be defined in the build file too. This is made possible by providing users with an initializr and a finalizr; inside the initialize
callback, tasks such as generation of a list of test files or reading the package.json file can be defined, while in the finalize
callback users can define moving of the build files or pushing the source maps to their server.
Pro The same results will be yielded every time yarn is run in a repository
One of the most important aspects of Yarn is determinism (predictability). The lock file ensures that the same dependencies will always be installed in the same way and order regardless of the machine for a given repository.
Pro Can tell you why a package was installed
yarn why <query>
can tell you why a package was installed and what other packages depend on it.
Pro Good network performance
Yarn efficiently queues up requests and avoids request waterfalls in order to maximize network utilization.
Pro Offline mode
If you've installed a package before, you can install it again without any internet connection.
Pro Flat Mode
Resolve mismatching versions of dependencies to a single version to avoid creating duplicates.
Pro Multiple registries
Install any package from either npm or Bower and keep your package workflow the same.
Pro Network resilience
A single request failing won't cause an install to fail. Requests are retried upon failure.
Pro Good documentation
It looks like it has good documentation.
Pro Security is put at the forefront
Even though it's still in its early stages of development, security is one of the core values on which Yarn is built. It uses checksums to verify the integrity of every package before executing its code. This also helps avoiding errors related to faulty caching or captive portals.
Further steps are also being taken to improve the security of Yarn which will be implemented in the future.
Pro Built by the community for the community
Even though it's backed by Facebook, Yarn is built as a community project first and foremost. It's completely open source and hosted on Github. It's released under a standard open source client and has its own GitHub organization and set up to work under the same governance model that other successful projects have used in the past, such as Rust and Ember.
All of this means that both existing and new contributors will always work together to improve the product and introduce new features while also keeping in mind suggestions coming from the community.
Pro Backed by Facebook and Google
Was created in a collaboration of Facebook with Exponent, Google and Tilde.
Cons
Con Potentially unsupported
No activity on repo in 2 years as of Oct 2015
Con Configuration files are bloated and long
Pint's configuration files are the same as Grunt's. Meaning that they are long and hard to read, especially for new users.
Con Takes up disk space
Yarn adds to your disk space usage since it stores dependencies locally.