Gulp task runs much faster without 'return' statement - why is that?

Question

Gulp task formed like this (without return ) runs much faster:

gulp.task('less', function () {
  gulp.src('./less/**/*.less')
   .pipe(less())
   .pipe(gulp.dest('./destination'));
});

than the same one with return :

gulp.task('less', function () {
  return gulp.src('./less/**/*.less')
   .pipe(less())
   .pipe(gulp.dest('./destination'));
});

So, my question is what does Gulp task is supposed to return ? Why is it so much faster without return , while it still generates expected files?

Answer 1

After some investigation I found that when return is used on Gulp task it's not actually slower at all, it just returns correct time it took to finish the task.

It only felt faster since without return statement it essentially returned result as completed almost instantly, so the task time looked like few ms, but the actual process continued on the background and completed silently.

So, it's safe to say that it's prefferable to use return on all your tasks that have gulp.src() .