Breaking Free from Babel: Efficient Alternatives for Frontend Developers
As frontend developers, we’ve all been there – wasting precious time on excessive tooling, particularly when it comes to Babel. But what if I told you there’s a way to break free from this tedious process? In this article, we’ll explore three efficient alternatives to Babel, helping you streamline your workflow and focus on what really matters.
Understanding the Problem
Babel is a compiler that converts modern JavaScript to run in older browsers. However, with browsers constantly evolving, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to support them all while still utilizing modern features. The solution often lies in transpiling and polyfilling, but these processes can add code bloat and complexity.
Alternative No. 1: Don’t Support Ancient Browsers
Before we dive into alternatives, let’s ask ourselves: do we really need to support ancient browsers? By analyzing our analytics data, we can determine which browsers our customers are actually using. If we don’t need to support IE11, for instance, we can avoid the hassle of transpiling and polyfilling altogether.
Alternative No. 2: Use eslint-plugin-compat
Another approach is to use eslint-plugin-compat, which allows your code editor to alert you if you’re using features that are too modern for your customers’ browsers. This eliminates the need for transpilers and gives you hands-on control over your production code.
Setting Up eslint-plugin-compat
To get started, add the necessary packages to your project and create a .eslintrc.json file. With the VS Code ESLint extension installed, any browser API that’s incompatible with your browserlist config will be flagged as a linting error.
Alternative No. 3: Use Other Software to Replace Babel
If you still need to transpile and polyfill, there are faster and more efficient alternatives to Babel. One such option is swc, a new competitor written in Rust that’s up to 20 times faster. Another option is Google Closure Compiler, although it can be more complicated to use.
The Pros and Cons of Each Alternative
Each alternative has its pros and cons. Babel has a large community and is relatively straightforward to use, but it’s slow and comes with many dependencies. swc, on the other hand, is much faster and has fewer dependencies, but it doesn’t support all Babel features. Google Closure Compiler can do a good job of transpiling and polyfilling, but it requires more work to configure.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you don’t automatically need to support old browsers. By analyzing your analytics data and using linting to ensure backward compatibility, you can save yourself the hassle of creating a special build step and relying on transpilation. If you do opt for automatic translation, then swc is a faster and more efficient alternative to Babel.