What is New with Gulp v5?

Gulp v5 marks a significant milestone in the development of this popular build automation tool, encapsulating four years of intensive work and collaboration. This version introduces a switch to the streamx library, which offers enhanced capabilities over the traditional Node.js core streams, such as transparent handling of object and buffer modes and improved error management.

The development team has worked diligently to refine Gulp's dependency tree, opting to maintain or replace dependencies that had become unsupported since the release of Gulp 4. This has led to a more robust and streamlined codebase, albeit with some breaking changes that users need to be aware of, although these are designed to cause minimal disruption to existing workflows.

In terms of functionality, Gulp v5 has standardized its globbing library across all APIs to ensure consistency and has deprecated older features in favor of more modern solutions. It now supports UTF-8 encoding by default, reflecting modern web development standards.

Additionally, the CLI has been enhanced with loaders for new JavaScript standards like .mjs and .cjs and has removed some outdated loaders. The Node.js support has also been updated to drop older, unsupported versions in favor of enhancing functionality and performance on more recent versions.

The release of Gulp v5 is a testament to the commitment of the development team towards evolving with the needs of modern developers and maintaining robustness and efficiency. It promises enhanced performance, reduced complexity, and improved compatibility with current development practices. This update is not just a tool improvement; it's a platform evolution that supports contemporary development workflows more effectively.

What are your thoughts about Gulp v5?