Build Tools – Make, no more
So he's saying use 'make' instead of gulp/grunt and then he submits an example where it's as easy as piping through GCC.<p>He's making the wrong assumption that you don't need to setup a build environment when building with make, but to have gcc you will still also need to install g++ and build-tools. Also, he refers to building on Windows using yet another specialist tool, but have you recently tried building anything C++ on Windows when you don't have visual studio, or even worse, CYGWIN installed?<p>When you make such a statement, then please show me a makefile that's not 10.000 lines long, that will do the same as this, but without NPM and 'downloading half of the internet'.<p><pre><code>   gulp.task('scripts', function() {
      // Minify and copy all JavaScript (except vendor scripts)
     return gulp.src(paths.scripts)
      .pipe(coffee())
      .pipe(uglify())
      .pipe(concat('all.min.js'))
      .pipe(gulp.dest('build/js'));
  });
</code></pre>
I submit that's impossible, simply because this stuff took 2 years to evolve (for the Javascript toolchain, that is) and a lot of people went through hours of frustration trying out alternative methods.