[prophesi]

It might be doing much less, but for most people it does plenty. You've still got your classes, arrow functions, modules, and whatnot. If your build iterations are averaging ~20 seconds on a device because of babel, I fail to see the problem with switching it out with Typescript.

[krainboltgreene]

Here's the problem: Your 20s build times aren't because of babel.

[prophesi]

Ok, I'll bite. What's my problem?

[krainboltgreene]

I can't possibly know the actual problem. It could be a multitude of issues, hell it could even be one unofficial babel plugin, but it is absolutely not babel taking 20s.

Babel is essentially `cp` but with a slight twist: AST -> AST conversion. That doesn't take a huge amount of time.

[prophesi]

This is purely anecdotal, and we could very well have done something wrong with our configuration, but I had my build iteration times cut in more than half after switching our project to CommonJS + ES6 Typescript from es2015-preset Babel.

I think we were using Gulp without any hot module replacement, so there are other ways we could have sped up our build time, but Typescript was good enough.