The State of JavaScript 2017
Interesting to see that Webpack has continued to gain ground on Gulp as the leading top-level build tool that people use, because from my experience it seems slightly over-engineered for 99% of use cases.<p>Webpack uses the &quot;configure a black box + add a bunch of plugins&quot; approach to the front-end build pipeline, whereas I recently used Gulp to create a beautiful build workflow using Rollup, Babel ES6, JSX, Sass, and a basic livereload webserver in less than 80 lines of very readable, plain javascript code that would take roughly 5 minutes to explain to a new developer on my team faced with build pipeline modifications.<p>I also don&#x27;t think many people understand that using Webpack encourages non-ES6 import semantics that will break your source code if you ever decide to switch from Webpack. Encouraging things like &quot;import app.css&quot; seems like it might confuse junior developers who don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s going on under the hood, or have to eventually work in non-Webpack systems.<p>Sorry for the rant here, haha, I&#x27;m a huge fan of these surveys and love taking the opportunity to talk crap on build tools &#x2F; frameworks :).