babel-handbook VS snabbdom

For more information about building Babel plugins, check the Kent's Babel Handbook or this awesome Babel handbook by Jamie.

Babel does this by compiling down JavaScript code written with the latest standards into a version that will work everywhere today. This process is known as source-to-source compiling, also known as transpiring. Source: Jamie Kyle

I'll be honest, my approach to getting used to working with ASTs is a bit weird, but it worked for me. For some reason the thought of working with the TypeScript AST sounds really attractive to me. I'm sure most people recommend to start deep diving into babel first before getting used to working with an AST with the TypeScript compiler, but I started it the other way around. There is a great library called ts-morph that focuses on making it easier for developers to work with the TypeScript compiler. Learning hands on with ts-morph while getting used to their compiler api made babel much easier to understand without ever touching babel.

Those videos gave me a base for the task but I needed more sources to achieve it, so I read a lot of source code for other libraries built with babel-plugin-macros, read the plugin's authoring documentation and Jamie Kyle's Babel Handbook.

If you want to learn more about parsing, reading the code of an actual recursive parser might be a better idea. Esprima is a decent place to start if you're interested in JS grammar. Then you can look at the babel handbook to learn more about AST transformations. From there, the literature gets quite a bit more heavy. If you get this far and are willing to push further, you'll probably want to grab yourself a copy of the dragon book at a minimum.

Babel handbook

I like to use snabbdom to demonstrate concepts in several of my posts because it is short, simple, powerful and uses several techniques that are relative to the topics I wrote about in the past. Snabbdom is a front end JavaScript library that lets you work with a virtual DOM to create robust web applications. They focus on simplicity, modularity and performance.

A good repository to learn from this concept is snabbdom, a virtual DOM library that focuses on simplicity, modularity, and powerful features to improve performance when working with the DOM.

Compared with other virtual DOMs (see snabbdom, virtual-dom), it's significantly faster. These older methods use node-by-node diffing, or the traversal and comparison of the node tree in order to calculate the optimal DOM modifications to reduce reflow and repaints.

I was disappointed by commitlint and commitizen, so I wrote this tool. IMO having such a tool makes you think more about your commit messages and thus makes you write better ones. See these for example: https://github.com/snabbdom/snabbdom/pull/948/commits