Task Runner Census 2025

https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-task-runners-census/

by aleyan • 1 year ago

30 14 1 year ago

psini• 1 year ago

It seems biased that only GitHub was scraped, that seems like it would mostly exclude systems linked to other forges like GitLab CI.

mcny• 1 year ago

I used gitlab.com CI a lot but then at some point all the restrictions started and now it is not worth it trying to figure out how much quota is enough, especially for small personal projects. I don't remember the last time I wrote a git lab CI yaml file.

dijit2• 1 year ago

I know there's all kinds of biases in what we see.

But, from a european gamedev standpoint, I have never worked in a company that professionally depended on github-actions.

All I ever saw was Gitlab-CI and Jenkins (and a small instance of buildbot).

So seeing the absolute dominance of github-actions is somewhat jarring to me and doesn't paint a picture of my lived reality.

That said; none of what I'm talking about is open source - but I would expect to see more gitlab-ci in this list.

EconomistFar• 1 year ago

Cool comparison. Both guys helped shape early computing but in totally different ways, one pushing from the garage, the other from within the system. It’s a good reminder that innovation doesn’t follow one path and impact isn’t always loud or obvious at first.

camilomatajira5• 1 year ago

Make is still king in 2025. I don't understand why someone would use Just or Taskfile instead of Make. My only hypothesis is that people believe (erroneously) that whatever is new is automatically better than what is older.

anentropic• 1 year ago

The readme on Just repo explains pretty well why it's better than Make for the things people often misuse Make for, and why it's not intended for the use case that Make was originally built for.

camilomatajira5• 1 year ago

I read Just's readme the other day. Basically they say Just is better than Make because in Just all targets are phony by default (something you can make easily in Make). And because they provide a flag to list the targets (which you can make easily in Make). And because Make is to too complex to differentiate between = and := (which as an user almost always gives you the same result, even if you don't understand the difference). These are basically the reasons, which are not convincing for me.

Anyway, 26K people find

andreynering• 1 year ago

Task creator here.

At the time I created it, I worked on Windows more often and I had a lot of trouble trying to find a Make build that works fine on Windows. The ones available for Windows are usually incompatible with the GNU version. So cross-platform support is one advantage of alternative tools.

Other than that, Task has a lot of features, so some use cases are not covered by Make.

That said, I'm not a Make hater. If it works for you, that's absolutely fine. Many people has found value in Task, though.

camilomatajira5• 1 year ago

Congratulations on you project, hope to have once a project as succesfull as yours. I would like to clarify that I don't mean to bash Task, just tired of critiques saying that Make is bad because is old, and Just and Task are better only because they are new.

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 year ago

To be fair, make is kind of weird in some ways that make it a pain to use if you're not used to it. Even just the stupid tab-only indentation is annoying. That said, it's ubiquitous and that wins over almost anything else in my opinion. Of course, you may take that with a grain of salt since I also write virtually all of my scripts in POSIX sh...

camilomatajira5• 1 year ago

I agree with you. Make has it's quirks, specially those builtin variables ($@, $<, etc), they are ugly but useful.

everforward• 1 year ago

I use Task and like it, though I have used make before and don't think it's awful.

Task's tracking of the source and the output feels cleaner than make's need for a clean command. I can have a tree of dependent tasks and it will rebuild the ones that are outdated without me doing a "make clean" and having to rebuild all of them.

The ability to include files is clean, though similar can be done in make with some recursion (which works, but I find hacky and hard to keep track of).

I also don't love make's DSL. I don't edit my build files often enough to really keep it in my head, so I feel like I'm constantly trying to remember how to do particular things.

Lastly, I think it's easier to share because even if you've never used Task the YAML is pretty self-descriptive. The first time I saw a Taskfile it wasn't hard to grok how it worked. Make is pretty opaque if you've never seen a Makefile before, and I've met a lot of junior devs that have never interacted with it.

Task Runner Census 2025

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