Blog

The official babel blog.

Babel Turns Three

Posted Oct 5, 2017 by Henry Zhu

Happy Birthday Babel! 🎂 (Sept 28)

Planning for 7.0

Posted Sep 12, 2017 by Henry Zhu

If you didn’t know already, we’re planning on releasing a 7.0 version soon 🙌 ! Work on it actually started back in February, when I just wanted to make a release to drop Node 0.10/0.12 support and remove babel-runtime and various other code. And since then, we’ve done releases up to alpha.20.

Zero-config code transformation with babel-macros

Posted Sep 11, 2017 by Kent C. Dodds

Babel started out as a transpiler to let you write the latest version of the ECMAScript specification but ship to environments that don’t implement those features yet. But it has become much more than that. “Compilers are the New Frameworks” says Tom Dale and I could not agree more. We’re seeing more and more compile-time optimizations for libraries and frameworks. I’m not talking about syntax extensions to the language, but simple code transformations that enable patterns that would be difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Contributing to Babel: Three Lessons to Remember

Posted Aug 16, 2017 by Karl Cheng

Getting to work your way around a new code base always poses its challenges, and Babel was no exception.

Personal Experiences at Babel #1 — A PR with Unusually High Number of Reviews

Posted Aug 11, 2017 by Peeyush Kushwaha

We landed the parser support for the stage-2 decorators spec last week at Babylon — the parser for Babel. If you don’t know what a decorator is, the gist of it is that a decorator gives some concise syntax to affect the definition of a class or a class method which you decorate.

Babel and Summer of Code 2017

Posted Aug 9, 2017 by Henry Zhu

For the first time, Babel is participating in Summer of Code! Although we forgot to make an announcement post earlier, here’s our progress update 😊

Upgrade to Babel 7 (WIP)

Posted Mar 1, 2017 by Sven SAULEAU, Henry Zhu

Refer users to this document when upgrading to Babel 7 (currently alpha).

Upgrade to Babel 7 for Tool Authors (WIP)

Posted Mar 1, 2017 by Sven SAULEAU, Henry Zhu

Refer users to this document for those that create tools that depend on Babel (such as Babel plugins).

6.23.0 Released

Posted Feb 13, 2017 by Henry Zhu

In this release: multiple improvements to the react-constant-elements plugin by @STRML, some codegen optimizations, and lots of bug fixes! Thanks to @loganfsmyth for the release + reviews!

The State of Babel

Posted Dec 7, 2016 by Henry Zhu

6.19.0 Released

Posted Nov 16, 2016 by Henry Zhu

object-rest-spread works standalone and a few new plugin options APIs were added!

6.18.0 Released

Posted Oct 24, 2016 by Henry Zhu

More flow updates, and lots of fixes!

6.16.0 Released

Posted Sep 28, 2016 by Henry Zhu

Happy Birthday Babel 🎂 !

Babili (babel-minify)

Posted Aug 30, 2016 by Henry Zhu

We released Babili as beta (0.0.1) a few days ago under an MIT license!

6.14.0 Released

Posted Aug 24, 2016 by Henry Zhu

A new es2017, latest preset, and lots of fixes in this release.

Babel Doctor

Posted Nov 3, 2015 by Sebastian McKenzie

Babel Doctor is heavily inspired ripped from the awesome Yeoman Doctor by Sindre Sorhus.

Setting up Babel 6

Posted Oct 31, 2015 by James Kyle

Babel 6 is fresh off the press and we’re still getting a lot sorted out. In the past two days we’ve seen more activity on GitHub and Slack than ever before. Everyone who has been helping out has been doing a great job.

6.0.0 Released

Posted Oct 29, 2015 by James Kyle

NOTE: Not all integrations have been updated yet. This is a very disruptive major so please bear with us as we smooth out the edges.

React on ES6+

Posted Jun 7, 2015 by Steven Luscher

While redesigning Instagram Web from the inside out this year, we enjoyed using a number of ES6+ features to write our React components. Allow me to highlight some of the ways that these new language features can change the way you write a React app, making it easier and more fun than ever.

Function Bind Syntax

Posted May 14, 2015 by James Kyle

Babel 5.4 was just released and with it comes support for a new experimental ES7 syntax proposed by Kevin Smith (@zenparsing) and implemented in Babel by Ingvar Stepanyan (@RReverser).

5.0.0 Released

Posted Mar 31, 2015 by Sebastian McKenzie

In the past few months Babel has been welcomed into several major communities such as Node, React, Ember, Backbone, Angular, Rails, and many others. We launched the Users page only a few weeks ago and it’s really cool to see everyone that is using it. Companies like CloudFlare, Netflix, Mozilla, and Yahoo!. Projects like Ghost, Atom, Mapbox, and so many more.

Babel <3 React

Posted Feb 23, 2015 by James Kyle

One of the things that surprises people quite often is that Babel supports JSX out of the box.

Not Born to Die

Posted Feb 15, 2015 by James Kyle

I like to start off our blog posts with the latest big thing 6to5 has achieved. We haven’t reached it quite yet, but in a few days 6to5 and 6to5-core will have been downloaded half a million times, and in a month or so it will be over a million times.

2to3

Posted Jan 27, 2015 by James Kyle

These past few weeks we’ve seen lots of activity on 6to5; thousands are downloading it every day from all corners of the world. In the past month, over 200 issues have been closed. Since the 2.0 release, there have been 867 commits and 60 minor and patch releases. It’s now among the top 1% of most downloaded packages on npm, with nearly 100k downloads in the last month alone.

6to5 + esnext

Posted Jan 12, 2015 by James Kyle

The past few months have been exciting for 6to5. We’ve gone from being an educational project to having 100k downloads on npm, there’s been 1,800 commits and 155 releases, we now support every major JavaScript build system, and recently we became a Sprockets 4.0 default. To top it off, our new website and documentation received tens of thousands of pageviews, and has been featured by several publications including JavaScript Weekly.