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Mention babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint #19

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merged 1 commit into from Nov 21, 2018
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Mention babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint #19

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6 changes: 5 additions & 1 deletion README.md
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Expand Up @@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ console.log(String(result));

Note: explicitly call `toString` on any `JSBI` instances when `console.log()`ing them to see their numeric representation (e.g. `String(max)` or `max.toString()`). Without it (e.g. `console.log(max)`), you’ll instead see the object that represents the value.

Use [babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint) to transpile JSBI code into native BigInt code.

Refer to the detailed instructions below for more information.

## Why?
Expand All @@ -32,7 +34,7 @@ Refer to the detailed instructions below for more information.

To use BigInts in your code today, you need a library. But there’s a difficulty: the BigInt proposal changes the behavior of operators (like `+`, `>=`, etc.) to work on BigInts. These changes are impossible to polyfill directly; and they are also making it infeasible (in most cases) to transpile BigInt code to fallback code using Babel or similar tools. The reason is that such a transpilation would have to replace every single operator in the program with a call to some function that performs type checks on its inputs, which would incur an unacceptable performance penalty.

The solution is to do it the other way round: write code using a library’s syntax, and translate it to native BigInt code when available. JSBI is designed for exactly this purpose: it provides a BigInt “polyfill” implementation that behaves exactly like the upcoming native BigInts, but with a syntax that you can ship on all browsers, today.
The solution is to do it the other way round: write code using a library’s syntax, and [transpile it to native BigInt code](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint) when available. JSBI is designed for exactly this purpose: it provides a BigInt “polyfill” implementation that behaves exactly like the upcoming native BigInts, but with a syntax that you can ship on all browsers, today.

Its advantages over other, existing big-integer libraries are:

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -104,6 +106,8 @@ It is impossible to replicate the exact behavior of the native `++` and `--` ope

Now! The JSBI library is ready for use today.

Once BigInts are natively supported everywhere, use [babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/babel-plugin-transform-jsbi-to-bigint) to transpile your JSBI code into native BigInt code once and for all.

View [our issue tracker](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/jsbi/issues) to learn more about out our future plans for JSBI, and please join the discussion!

A more vague future plan is to use the JSBI library (or an extension to it) as a staging ground for additional BigInt-related functionality. The official proposal is intentionally somewhat minimal, and leaves further “library functions” for follow-up proposals. Examples are a combined `exp`+`mod` function, and bit manipulation functions.
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