Skip to main content

· 9 min read

One of the greatest strengths of open source software is that it is open and free for anyone to contribute. This also leads to one of its greatest challenges, which is to support consistent, sustainable maintenance.

Babel isn't a company. As mentioned in the 7.0.0 post, the all-volunteer Babel team (sans Henry) has been doing its best to steward the project and handle all the expectations of the community. We're glad that we have continued to make releases, but even keeping up-to-date with reported issues is difficult to manage, let alone our integrations with other tools, new proposals, and effect on the greater ecosystem.

In March 2018, Henry left his job to start working on securing more funding for Babel. After a lot of work and support from the community, the team was able to fund Henry as a full-time maintainer.

This has been a big win for the team, but we're finding that it is not enough.

· 9 min read

Today we are releasing Babel 7.7.0!

This release includes new parser features like top-level await (await x(), Stage 3) and Flow enum declarations (Flow proposal). And now, @babel/parser has the option of recovering from certain syntax errors!

We've also added support for TypeScript 3.7: Babel can parse and transform private class fields with type annotations, public class fields annotations defined using the declare keyword, type assertion function signatures and template literals in enum declarations.

Babel now understands three new configuration files: babel.config.json, babel.config.cjs and .babelrc.cjs, which behave the same as babel.config.js and .babelrc.js files.

Lastly, Babel 7.7.0 uses 20% less memory than 7.6.0.

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

· 7 min read

Today we are releasing Babel 7.5.0!

This release includes improved support for a few ECMAScript proposals: the F# variant of the Stage 1 pipeline operator and an official plugin for the Stage 4 dynamic import() proposal (along with preset-env support). It also has support for TypeScript namespaces (experimental) and for Browserslist's default query in preset-env.

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

· 5 min read

Today we're announcing the The Babel Podcast!

You probably use Babel, directly or as a dependency. But do you ever wonder who works on it? Henry Zhu chats with other members of the team, TC39, and the JS community about the future of JavaScript and how it's all maintained. Please join us in babbling about Babel (and everything else)!

Subscribe with: Apple | Google | Spotify | RSS​

· 11 min read

Today we are releasing Babel 7.4.0!

This release includes support for TypeScript 3.4, the proposal for partial application in function calls, and static private methods.

We added support for meaningful parenthesized expressions in @babel/parser, and also made it more spec compliant than ever!

Last but not least, both @babel/preset-env and @babel/transform-runtime now support core-js@3, and @babel/template has some sweet new syntax!

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.