[beaconstudios]

it's the streaming/caching side of gulp that I find most useful to be honest. When I have 3-4 build outputs being generated and I can offload intermediate objects into a cache file and back it can lead to really fast builds. In replacing grunt with gulp and setting up gulp correctly I've reduced builds from 10-15 seconds to nearly instant before, and I think the main failing of webpack is how slow a non-watch build can run, or how large its output size can be. I think entrypoints and code splitting could be achieved with a gulp-like system by picking files to be packaged into different builds.

It's also very easy to find build bottlenecks with gulp which is very handy if you have a large project with a slow build. It allows you to scale out efficiently.

[chatmasta]

Webpack hot reload server solves this problem and provides nearly instant builds.

Yes, production (“non-watch”) builds can take a while. But who cares? You shouldn’t be running a production build after every code change. That’s why the hot reload server is so useful; it only recompiles the code you changed.