Grunt vs Yarn

Grunt emphasizes configuration over code. As such grunt configurations are easy to write. Writing them does not require knowledge of streams, promises, concurrency, or asynchronous tasks to set up.

Grunt has been available for a long time and during this time it has garnered a large community of dedicated developers who have made more than 4000 grunt plugins available to be used.

The default behaviors for most plugins is normally what you want, so if you just use a plugin without configuring it, it will work for most use cases.

A graphical user interface for grunt is available via spock.

You can use Grunt as a config file or JavaScript by writing your functions via Node Modules.

Grunt version 1 alpha, aka grunt-next, the upcoming next major release of Grunt, uses Orchestrator to sequence and execute tasks and dependencies with maximum concurrency, potentially bringing it up to speed with Gulp in term of performance.

The API is built in such a way that if you write a Grunt task that is useful for someone else out there or would be useful for future projects, it can be easily made into a grunt plugin and then shared using npm.

There is a Grunt plugin called grunt-exec which allows developers to execute shell commands inside their Grunt files. This is extremely easy if a developer is developing only in Node and constantly getting out of Node environment to run something like a git command can become frustrating.

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.

yarn why <query> can tell you why a package was installed and what other packages depend on it.

Yarn efficiently queues up requests and avoids request waterfalls in order to maximize network utilization.

If you've installed a package before, you can install it again without any internet connection.

Resolve mismatching versions of dependencies to a single version to avoid creating duplicates.

Install any package from either npm or Bower and keep your package workflow the same.

A single request failing won't cause an install to fail. Requests are retried upon failure.

It looks like it has good documentation.

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.

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.

Was created in a collaboration of Facebook with Exponent, Google and Tilde.