For those of us that need to support older browsers, we run a compiler like Babel over application code. But that's not all of the code that we ship to browsers; there's also the code in our node_modules.
Can we make compiling our dependencies not just possible, but normal?
Check out Planning for 7.0 for the last updates throughout the 7.0 pre-releases. If something isn't clear in this post let me know!
Happy Birthday Babel! 🎂 (Sept 28)
Babel has really come a long way since Sebastian started the project only 3 years ago! A while back it was renamed from 6to5 to Babel; for good reason as it has significantly contributed to the use of ES2015+ by many companies, libraries, and developers alike.
If you didn't know already, we're planning on releasing a 7.0 version soon 🙌 ! Work on it actually started back in February, when I just wanted to make a release to drop Node 0.10/0.12 support and remove babel-runtime and various other code. And since then, we've done releases up to alpha.20.
Babel started out as a transpiler to let you write the latest version of the ECMAScript specification but ship to environments that don't implement those features yet. But it has become much more than that. "Compilers are the New Frameworks" says Tom Dale and I could not agree more. We're seeing more and more compile-time optimizations for libraries and frameworks. I'm not talking about syntax extensions to the language, but simple code transformations that enable patterns that would be difficult to accomplish otherwise.
Getting to work your way around a new code base always poses its challenges, and Babel was no exception.
I’ve been working with Babel as part of the Google Summer of Code 2017 program, working to update Babel transforms and the Babylon parser to accommodate changes to specifications and implementing new features.
Here’s a few things I’ve learnt from my adventures so far.
We landed the parser support for the stage-2 decorators spec last week at Babylon — the parser for Babel. If you don’t know what a decorator is, the gist of it is that a decorator gives some concise syntax to affect the definition of a class or a class method which you decorate.
For the first time, Babel is participating in Summer of Code! Although we forgot to make an announcement post earlier, here's our progress update 😊
We are moving the migration guide to a docs page instead of a blog post!
Refer users to this document for those that create tools that depend on Babel (such as Babel plugins).
We are moving the migration guide to a docs page instead of a blog post!