It may just be a paranoid delusion, but I'm worried that Babel is trying to become a more encompassing build tool ala Grunt/Gulp instead of just transpiling. I love Babel and plan to continue to use it in the future for my front-end development, but the "doing it all ourselves" is a little bit much.<p>I would much rather see a recommendation and efforts around Uglify than a brand new minimization tool, and I would rather see work on acorn[1] rather than around a new parser[2], because these things fragment the community rather than bring them together.<p>Edit: Yes, Uglify has taken a long time to get work done on ES2015, but note that the spec has changed a lot over that time. It does feel like they are dragging their feet or not getting much done in that front, but all the more reason to put one of the Babel devs who may have more free time on the project to get more things going.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/marijnh/acorn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/marijnh/acorn</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/babel/babylon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/babel/babylon</a>
There is currently a discussion going on about changing the name back to babel-minify (you can vote)<p><a href="https://github.com/babel/babili/issues/124" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/babel/babili/issues/124</a>
Competition is great. The more minifiers the better.<p>At a usability level, babili has a 33M install footprint and must be installed locally in the directory in which you intend to use it.<p>uglify-js can be installed globally and has a 1.9M install size.<p>And I've never understood how to configure babel's preset and plugin files. Why is it necessary for a minifier to do this? Surely this can be greatly simplified.
Interesting, but the only 'Pro' I can actually see here is ES6 support when you were previously using uglify. I think using Closure Compiler on TypeScript output with the right JSDoc comments can yield much better results as there is much more information the minifier can work with.
You don't need Babel or a build process to minify ES6. Pretty Diff has supported this for years <a href="http://prettydiff.com/?m=minify" rel="nofollow">http://prettydiff.com/?m=minify</a>
Ah, are they going to make a minifier based on Bublé (<a href="https://buble.surge.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://buble.surge.sh/</a>), too? Perhaps they could call it Bublili.