Here’s the Deal

Broccoli vs GNU Make

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When comparing Broccoli vs GNU Make, the Slant community recommends GNU Make for most people. In the question“What are the best Node.js build systems / task runners?” GNU Make is ranked 8th while Broccoli is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose GNU Make is:

Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.

Specs

Number of Plugins200+

Processing methodPipeline

Task instruction styleConfiguration

PlatformsUnix, Linux, Windows, Mac

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best Node.js build systems / task runners?

Pros

Pro
Brocfile fairly straightforward and small

Pro
Rebuilds are really fast

In larger apps rebuilds get slower and slower as the size of the application increases. Broccoli deals with this by building only the files that were changed and intelligently figuring out their dependencies. This leads to rebuilds being of O(1) constant-time (in Software Engineering terms).

Pro
Chainable plugins

With broccoli developers can chain plugins.

var tree = broccoli.makeTree('lib')
tree = compileCoffeeScript(tree)
tree = uglifyJS(tree)
return tree

Pro
Uses the full power of the UNIX shell

Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.

Pro
No need for wrapper modules

Other build tools need wrapper modules to do certain tasks. The biggest disadvantage of these wrapper modules is that they bind you to a version of that tool. With Make you don't have that problem, there's no need for wrappers and no tools to bind you to a version, you can use any version of Make that you want.

Pro
Works with more than just node.js

Since it's written in C and can be found in all UNIX-based systems it can be used on platforms other than node.js.

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Cons

Con
Windows not fully supported

Con
Assumptions about your project limit what you can do

Assumes you want to always output to single output directory. This directory must not exist at the time of running. It also (therefore) can't be your current directory. This puts broccoli slightly out of the class of a truly general "task runner".

Con
Small community

Broccoli's community is still relatively small and not very active, at least compared to it's competitors. This leads to fewer plugins, guides and less support from developers for any problem that you may face using Broccoli.