postcss-font-family-system-ui VS Babel (Formerly 6to5)

I am Jùnliàng, a Babel contributor since 2019. I would like to share my perspective here.

GH is a platform where people collaborate on developing softwares, so the contribution graph is engineering-biased. But operating an OSS, especially like Babel which is serving millions, is just like running a company. In a company we have different roles, none of roles is more important than the others. In Babel team, Henry spends most time on reaching out to contacts in companies, giving talks, syncing with different projects in the ecosystem, offering mentorship to junior contributors like me. None of these is visible on GH but they are vital to sustain the project, to attract both new company sponsors and contributors.

2020 is a hard time for any reasons. Before we talk about funding with team, Henry has already voluntarily pooled less money ($11k to $8k) and another long-time core contributor Brian (https://github.com/existentialism) stopped taking money. While this helped bumped up our balance, everyone taking less is a dangerous signal to an OSS: maintainers constantly fighting with financial insecurity may burn out or stop maintaining in order to recover from the mental pressure about "I am responsible for this".

I maintained small side projects like (https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui), where the feature set is frozen and most maintenance works can be automated by bots. This is quite unlike Babel: The feature is open-ended because the language is evolving. Various edge cases should be take cared. Tradeoffs between spec compliance and output code size should be made. It is not a side project that I can dedicate part time efforts like 10hrs/week to work on.

Speaking for myself, I spend around 40hrs/week to meet my own productivity requirements. I don't think I deserve more than other paid team members because everyone has different time constraints and we don't track work time meticulously.

To avoid burn-out and not let Babel consume all my energy, I spare some time on encoding Chinese characters in Unicode, which, just like Babel, has profound impacts on ecosystem but long overlooked and underfunded. I helped submitted hundreds on characters in IRGN2487 (https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData...).

GitHub | Website

node 'node_modules/.bin/jest' '/Users/satparkash/code/test-app/src/A pp.test.tsx' -t 'App' FAIL src/App.test.tsx ● Test suite failed to run SyntaxError: /Users/satparkash/code/test-app/src/App.test.tsx: Support for the experimental syntax 'jsx' isn't currently enabled (6:12): 4 | describe('App', () => { 5 | it('should work as expected', () => { > 6 | render(); | ^ 7 | }); 8 | }); 9 | Add @babel/preset-react (https://github.com/babel/babel/tree/main/packages/babel-preset-react) to the 'presets' section of your Babel config to enable transformation. If you want to leave it as-is, add @babel/plugin-syntax-jsx (https://github.com/babel/babel/tree/main/packages/babel-plugin-syntax-jsx) to the 'plugins' section to enable parsing. Test Suites: 1 failed, 1 total Tests: 0 total Snapshots: 0 total Time: 0.278 s Ran all test suites matching /\/Users\/satparkash\/code\/test-app\/src\/App.test.tsx/i with tests matching "App".

Webpack (Babel) - https://babel.dev/

I do appreciate your transparency, though I disagree with the sentiment that I’m arguing from a position of bad faith.

It’s a self-evident fact that the Babel team has not shown a moment of interest in lowering their role in the JavaScript ecosystem to anything short of kingmakers. Have a gander at their GitHub README and what do we see?[1]

- “Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.” Indefinitely.

- Over a dozen sponsor logos. An embarrassment of riches.

- A literal audio recording of a song in praise of the project.

The Babel team has a well documented history of their priorities[2], emphasizing the need for a modular approach that has no exit strategy[3]. At best, we have a case of accidental entrenchment and long term dependence on the Babel brewing as early as 2017![4]

Compare this infinite circus to the humble but popular Normalize.css, which has the express purpose to stop existing.[5]

If the Babel team wants to raise some money, they can start by putting a plan together that would codify an exit strategy. It’s certainly more noble than their current plan of barnacling on to every NPM package…

- [1] https://github.com/babel/babel

- [2] https://github.com/babel/notes

- [3] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2016/2016-07/july...

- [4] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2017/2017-04/apri...

- [5] https://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/

The problem was I had used some new code, Javascript's replaceAll(), that is unsupported by older browsers. And, the setup I have to automatically fix such issues (called babel) is out of date. So, while this problem appears to be resolved there, I hadn't updated that in awhile.

babel-loader(v9.1.0): allows transpiling JavaScript files using Babel and webpack.

created 6 years ago to solve the specific problem of managing the Babel repo packages

https://github.com/babel/babel/discussions/13013 maybe this could help