ts-loader VS Babel (Formerly 6to5)

It'll be a little different than your typical "what is webpack?" article in that I write this as the maintainer of ts-loader, a loader used for integrating TypeScript with webpack. I've worked in the webpack ecosystem for some years now, and I'll share some of my experiences with you.

why I use @babel/preset-typescript over ts-loader and awesome-typescript-loader to complie TypeScript? it's blazingly faster than the others and has more perks(read #4) ts-loader doesn't natively support HMR(Hot Module Replacement) awesome-typescript-loader's latest release is on Jun 22, 2018 TypeScript With Babel: A Beautiful Marriage - Matt Turnbull's Post

Okay. The normal setup is that you use https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-loader or https://github.com/TypeStrong/fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin as part of your Webpack config. Those will run the TS compilation step as part of the Webpack processing sequence.

I've recently tried SWC for building my project instead of ts-loader and was blown away by its performance (I got 8x-10x speedup on a Windows machine).

{ "compilerOptions": { "target": "esnext", "module": "esnext", "strict": true, "jsx": "preserve", "importHelpers": true, "moduleResolution": "node", "experimentalDecorators": true, "skipLibCheck": true, "esModuleInterop": true, "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true, "sourceMap": true, "baseUrl": "./", "outDir": "./dist", // https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-loader/issues/1138 "importsNotUsedAsValues": "preserve", "types": [ "webpack-env" ], "paths": { "@/*": [ "src/*" ], "@shared/*": [ "../shared/*" ] }, "lib": [ "esnext", "dom", "dom.iterable", "scripthost" ] }, "include": [ "src/**/*.ts", "src/**/*.tsx", "src/**/*.vue", "tests/**/*.ts", "tests/**/*.tsx", "../shared/**/*" ], "exclude": [ "node_modules" ] }

See https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-loader#happypackmode. Switching to esbuild-loader cut my build time in half.

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