Babel is a
free and
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
transcompiler
A source-to-source translator, source-to-source compiler (S2S compiler), transcompiler, or transpiler is a type of translator that takes the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent sou ...
that is mainly used to convert ECMAScript#6th Edition – ECMAScript 2015, ECMAScript 2015+ (ES6+) code into backwards-compatible
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
code that can be run by older JavaScript engines. It allows web developers to take advantage of the newest features of the language.
Developers can use new JavaScript language features by using Babel to convert their source code into versions of JavaScript that a Web browser can process. Babel can also be used to compile TypeScript into JavaScript. The core version of Babel was downloaded 5 million times a month in 2016, and this increased to 16 million times a week in 2019.
Babel plugins transform syntax that is not widely supported into a backward-compatible version. For example, Arrow function, arrow functions, which are specified in ES6, are converted into regular function declarations. Non-standard JavaScript syntax such as JSX (JavaScript), JSX can also be transformed.
Babel can automatically inject polyfill (programming), polyfills provided by core-js
for support features that are missing entirely from JavaScript environments. For example, static methods such as
Array.from and Intrinsic function, built-ins such as
Promise are available only in ES6 and above, but they can be used in older environments if core-js is used.
See also
* Comparison of web browsers
* TypeScript
* Web development tools
* Webpack JavaScript bundler
*JavaScript library
References
External links
*
GitHub projectOrigin story
{{JavaScript
JavaScript programming tools
Software using the MIT license
Source-to-source compilers
Free software programmed in JavaScript
Cross-platform free software