Compiling JS in guix (typescript, babel, browserslist, webpack)

Compiling JS in guix (typescript, babel, browserslist, webpack)

[swedebugia]

Hi

I'm still trying to understand how to best tackle the JS challenge in Guix.

Babel / browserslist:
---------------------
Today I found this: 
https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist-example#babel

It seems that JS-devs have tools like Babel to compile their JS so that 
it runs in a specific target browser.

As the JS-language is evolving faster than the browsers it can do stuff 
some browsers do not support.

Typescript (MIT)
----------

This is a Microsoft sponsored superset of JS and a compiler that 
compiles typescript to standard JS.

It makes it possible to write functionally and for multiple platforms 
which seems to be the current trend in the JS-community.

We should focus on getting this into Guix just as we focused on getting 
node packaged.

Typescript is listed as a language at github and the following top 4 
projects (by stars) are:

-Visual Studio Code (MIT)
-Angular web framework (MIT)
-ant-design (MIT)
-ionic web app framework (MIT)

Webpack
-------
I don't understand the value of this tool.

"Bundle" seems to be the thing it does. What is that? Fancy concatenation?

Why is this needed?
-- 
Cheers Swedebugia

Re: Compiling JS in guix (typescript, babel, browserslist, webpack)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi swedebugia,

> I'm still trying to understand how to best tackle the JS challenge in Guix.
>
> Babel / browserslist:
> ---------------------
> Today I found this:
> https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist-example#babel
>
> It seems that JS-devs have tools like Babel to compile their JS so
> that it runs in a specific target browser.
>
> As the JS-language is evolving faster than the browsers it can do
> stuff some browsers do not support.

There is a new alternative for Babel written in Rust.  I don’t know if
it is a drop-in replacement, but this might be a good thing to
investigate.

    https://github.com/swc-project/swc

--
Ricardo