Blog

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.

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 😊

Refer users to this document when upgrading to Babel 7 (currently alpha).

Refer users to this document for those that create tools that depend on Babel (such as Babel plugins).

In this release: multiple improvements to the react-constant-elements plugin by @STRML, some codegen optimizations, and lots of bug fixes! Thanks to @loganfsmyth for the release + reviews!

object-rest-spread works standalone and a few new plugin options APIs were added!

More flow updates, and lots of fixes!

We released Babili as beta (0.0.1) a few days ago under an MIT license!

A new es2017, latest preset, and lots of fixes in this release.

Babel 6 is fresh off the press and we’re still getting a lot sorted out. In the past two days we’ve seen more activity on GitHub and Slack than ever before. Everyone who has been helping out has been doing a great job.

While redesigning Instagram Web from the inside out this year, we enjoyed using a number of ES6+ features to write our React components. Allow me to highlight some of the ways that these new language features can change the way you write a React app, making it easier and more fun than ever.

Babel 5.4 was just released and with it comes support for a new experimental ES7 syntax proposed by Kevin Smith (@zenparsing) and implemented in Babel by Ingvar Stepanyan (@RReverser).

In the past few months Babel has been welcomed into several major communities such as Node, React, Ember, Backbone, Angular, Rails, and many others. We launched the Users page only a few weeks ago and it’s really cool to see everyone that is using it. Companies like CloudFlare, Netflix, Mozilla, and Yahoo!. Projects like Ghost, Atom, Mapbox, and so many more.

One of the things that surprises people quite often is that Babel supports JSX out of the box.

I like to start off our blog posts with the latest big thing 6to5 has achieved. We haven’t reached it quite yet, but in a few days 6to5 and 6to5-core will have been downloaded half a million times, and in a month or so it will be over a million times.

These past few weeks we’ve seen lots of activity on 6to5; thousands are downloading it every day from all corners of the world. In the past month, over 200 issues have been closed. Since the 2.0 release, there have been 867 commits and 60 minor and patch releases. It’s now among the top 1% of most downloaded packages on npm, with nearly 100k downloads in the last month alone.

The past few months have been exciting for 6to5. We’ve gone from being an educational project to having 100k downloads on npm, there’s been 1,800 commits and 155 releases, we now support every major JavaScript build system, and recently we became a Sprockets 4.0 default. To top it off, our new website and documentation received tens of thousands of pageviews, and has been featured by several publications including JavaScript Weekly.