People commented so nicely on my first build tool FBU
that I decided to push it to the Elixir package manager Hex.pm. I renamed
it, though, since people pointed out that it could be used to build anything, not just the
front end. So now it’s called (still unimaginatively) MBU: Mix Build Utilities.
EDIT 2017-04-04: I have since renamed the project to MBU: Mix Build Utilities and published it on
Hex.pm: hex.pm/packages/mbu. I have edited the links and code examples in this post to
reflect that.
tl;dr I wrote my own build tool using Elixir’s Mix:
Nicd/mbu.
It’s no secret that I somewhat dislike the state of modern
web development. JavaScript is its own terrible world, but one of the sad parts of it
is the ecosystem and tooling around it. There’s a lot of innovation and hard work going on
in very many fragmented projects, resulting in reimplementations of already solved problems
and a ton of half working, alpha quality, 0.x versioned packages with unknown support status.
With these packages, you start your project by building an elaborate house of cards that is
the build system. And you dread the day when you need to touch it again.