Feature request: Allow disabling escaping

[ghost]

I've recently brought this up with jsesc: Essentially, there are valid scenarios where unescaped (or: non-ASCII-safe) code is required to prevent transpiled files from exploding in size.

Allow me to copy the gist of it over with some slight edits:

One of my projects requires me to have a binary blob (synchronously) ready at require time. Hence, part of the build pipeline is to load the blob into a string in the build step, and then read the string and convert it to a TypedArray during runtime.

When running the files through babel, the 119 KiB blob and 64 KiB source bundle up to 408 KiB after minification. One might have (very rougly) expected a total of around 64 KiB + 119 KiB = 183 KiB.

The problem is that most of the binary blob, which is loaded into the bundle, is escaped once babel has processed it, and the escaped representation takes up a lot of space. This limitation seems to be known and has been brought up in this discussion already.

I see you've implemented a minimal mode which only escapes very few characters. Since my payload contains a good amount of null bytes, this wouldn't help me a lot. My best option would be to specify an option such as none (feel free to bikeshed!), once babel allows passing options to jsesc.

@michaelficarra then rightfully argued:

Asking a dependency for an option which effectively disables it so that the consuming application doesn't need to avoid calling it seems inappropriate. Just have babel not call jsesc.

One solution to this problem would be to specify a boolean flag in the configuration that allows turning off escaping entirely.

[babel-bot]

Hey @Kdex! We really appreciate you taking the time to report an issue. The collaborators
on this project attempt to help as many people as possible, but we're a limited number of volunteers,
so it's possible this won't be addressed swiftly.

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[JLHwung]

Closing this as it has been fixed in #11384.