I was using `grunt` and `gulp` to build Node.js and AngularJS projects but I have to tell even boot 1.0 felt like a great step forward compared to them, despite of the abysmal startup times.<p>It allowed us to just jump into Clojure development from one day to the other while understanding what is the build system doing. I can't tell the same about the prepackaged grunt and gulp files which come with certain key-turn projects.
From the wiki for [Filesets](<a href="https://github.com/boot-clj/boot/wiki/Filesets" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/boot-clj/boot/wiki/Filesets</a>)<p>"<i>Build workflows necessarily involve the filesystem because it's not practical to send file contents around in memory as function arguments, and because we want to be able to leverage existing JVM tooling that generally operates on things in the class path and not on in-memory data structures.</i>"<p>so like unix pipes? What exactly is impractical about passing big values as function arguments? Isn't that how gulp works?
Interesting that a fileset concept has emerged. I would draw parallels with Ant, but this project seems to have already zoomed past ant for ease of use. Can boot be used to build pure java projects as well?