Grunt vs Pint

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.

Transparently handles calculations with quantities with uncertainties (like 3.14±0.01) meter via the uncertainties package.

A single codebase that runs unchanged in Python 2.7+ and Python 3.0+.

It supports a lot of numpy mathematical operations without monkey patching or wrapping numpy.

Supports fraction, float, decimal, numpy.ndarray, etc.

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.

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!).

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.

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.