Babel is a
free
Free may refer to:
Concept
* Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything
* Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism
* Emancipate, to procur ...
and
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
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 so ...
that is mainly used to convert
ECMAScript 2015+ (ES6+) code into backwards-compatible
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
code that can be run by older
JavaScript engine
A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance.
JavaScript engines are typical ...
s. 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
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
can process. Babel is 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 functions, which are specified in ES6, are converted into regular function declarations. Non-standard JavaScript syntax such as
JSX can also be transformed.
Babel can automatically inject
polyfills provided by core-js
for support features that are missing entirely from JavaScript environments. For example, static methods such as
Array.from and
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
General information
Basic general information about the browsers. Browsers listed on a light purple background are discontinued. Platforms with a yellow background have limited support.
Operating system support
Browsers are compiled to run o ...
*
TypeScript
*
Web development tools
Web development tools (often called devtools or inspect element) allow web developers to test and debug their code. They are different from website builders and integrated development environments (IDEs) in that they do not assist in the direct c ...
*
Webpack
Webpack is a free and open-source module bundler for JavaScript. It is made primarily for JavaScript, but it can transform front-end assets such as HTML, CSS, and images if the corresponding loaders are included. Webpack takes modules with depen ...
JavaScript bundler
*
JavaScript library
References
External links
*
GitHub projectOrigin story
{{JavaScript
Compilers
Free software
JavaScript programming tools
Software using the MIT license
Source-to-source compilers