Plans to drop babel in v3

[bitinn]

I have been thinking about this lately, once we dropped node v4 and v6 support in 3.x release, do we still need babel?

My gut feeling is node v8+ are modern enough that all of our code are covered, so there is no value in transpiling (and I want to change back to CommonJS syntax)

https://node.green

If possible I want to drop our build step (rollup) altogether.

[jimmywarting]

I'm on board with that too.

[gr2m]

I guess a build step would still be needed as modules are not the same in Node & web.

I ended up using @pika/pack, which is using rollup under the hood. I see it as a polyfill until we can have the same modules work in both, node & browser.

I wrote about my setup here: https://gist.github.com/gr2m/5dd2ec6e3a04c3dc79f0cbb46decbe46

[dmitriz]

@Bitin

My gut feeling is node v8+ are modern enough that all of our code are covered, so there is no value in transpiling (and I want to change back to CommonJS syntax)

The PR #649 is meant as the first step in this direction. It deals with single exports.

My question is now, what should be the strategy for multiple exports?
A possible way could be to avoid them altogether,
to prevent the modules from doing "too much".
Would that be desired or is some other strategy preferred?

[TimothyGu]

I’m very much onboard with removing Babel. The time has come for that. I still prefer to keep our source in ES module form though. It’s much easier to transform from ESM to CommonJS style than vice versa, and with the dust settling on Node.js’ support for ESM more people would want to use it, rather than relying on CJS-ES interop.

[bitinn]

@TimothyGu I hear you, but the status quo seems to be that many bundling tools are better at transforming from CommonJS to ESM? We have had a lot of problem with people trying to package up node-fetch for AWS using Webpack.

(My guess is most of them are confused about how Webpack/ESM work, but my anecdote observation remains that Webpack seem to just work with CommonJS?)

I love the named export from ESM, for sure, just that it seems to cause some troubles for users at the moment.

[TimothyGu]

many bundling tools are better at transforming from CommonJS to ESM

Well I meant like actually transforming the source, rather than providing interoperability. But if that's the difficulty people are having, then I'm all for it :)

[dmitriz]

@TimothyGu
Just trying to understand, if there is an example of specific benefit for this project from using CommonJS mixed along with ESM as it is now, rather than only CJS?

If yes, maybe I shouldn't have been wasting my time on #649 :)

[TimothyGu]

@dmitriz, I think I'll defer to other people in the thread as I haven't been as active.

[Richienb]

Babel and rollup have been dropped in favour of microbundle in 3.x