The State of Babel

Good occasion to thanks all the people who have been working on Babel.<p>Among other things, Babel allows me to use ES6&#x2F;ES7&#x2F;ES8 (e.g. async&#x2F;await), to write my components in JSX and to type my code with Flow.<p>It would be so painful to work without Babel.<p>Thanks guys!

I just want to say these people do amazing work. It&#x27;s truly been a pleasure to work with JS in 2016. Thank you to everyone working on Babel and the countless other great OSS projects. One of my goals for 2017 is to find a way to get involved.

Author here, if anyone had questions or wanted to know more about how to help out!<p>Personally, I&#x27;m most excited about babel-preset-env, and fixing how we work with the TC39 process via experimental plugins, and working with the community more.<p>For anyone wanting to get started in OSS or Babel I just started a year ago from knowing nothing about it!

I second (third?) the fact that I&#x27;m so thankful for these packages and contributors. Reading this article puts into perspective the amount of alignment within the community that it takes to be able to depend on external libraries to make our day-to-day easier.<p>It&#x27;s very humbling. I&#x27;m just here standing on the shoulders of giants.

Codemods support with Recast looks really impressive. I wonder how hard it&#x27;d be to use that to write a `gofmt` for JavaScript.

Not only is Babel great as a tool for transpiling JavaScript, I&#x27;ve found the plugin system to be splendid for building a compile-to-JS language as well. The tools are terrific to work with.

Interesting points. Good ideas for features I would like, and laid out in a way that makes me want to contribute.

Is this where CoffeeScript left off? How would you compare it to CoffeeScript?

Thanks to everyone working on these tools! They improve the DX sooo much!

As an outsider to FE development, when I see posts like this, I just shudder at the complexity of the ecosystem.

&gt; 6to5 did exactly that: easily turn ES6 code into ES5 codee