Pint vs GNU Make

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.

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.

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.

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.