title: How not to pointlessly rebuild dependancies during javascript developpement?
body: <p>I am not a professional developer - I'm just a self-taught amateur in the field, and I followed the trends with quite some delay. My history with javascript goes back to when I was 14 years old and randomly opened files on my <code>C:/Windows/</code> directory (it was Windows 98), until I found some intriguing <code>.js</code> files. I learned PHP, C and python, but came back to Javascript and follow his evolution from a scripting language to a full-stack tool - first, I played with Jquery a Jquery / XSLT stack, then made a little videogame using Websocket and Gulp and browserify , then recently learnt some Angular, Ionic and Vue, all based on Webpack. </p>
  
  <p>I'm having though about what tool to use as a task manager. Especially, I tends to think most of the tools used these days are inefficient - hard to configure, needing a thousand plugins to work, which often create incompatibilities between versions,... And more importantly (I may be wrong here) but how come none of them are checking which dependencies need to be rebuild? </p>
  
  <p>Last time, I was launching my test in a typescript project using <code>npm test</code> and got really frustrated. I realized the whole project was compiled every-time I changed a tiny detail in my test files. Having developed in C, I found that really inefficient and wrote a <code>makefile</code> to address that.</p>
  
  <p>Now the bad side of <code>make</code> is that it's kinda hard to make it work with modern javascript tools (<code>tsc</code> explicitely adviced me to use a <code>.tsconfig</code> file instead of the CLI). Another example is there is no official CLI tool to compile a <code>.vue</code> file into a render() function.</p>
  
  <p>Now my question is <em>is there a modern tool that doesn't require me to rebuild, compile, minify, uglify  my whole project and lose 30 seconds every time I add a commas in a file?</em> and <em>what's wrong with make?</em></p>
  
  <p>I would take any idea or correction about that matter with gratitude :)</p>