[ratww]

> Tools like webpack, babel [...] but are meant to decouple the maintainability of your code from the implementation details.

Let's be real, the only reason we really need WebPack and Babel at this point is for IE11 compatibility and JSX.

Currently >90% of the browsers (that depends on the country) are evergreen, and have support for most ES6 features, including ES6 modules. As soon as we're able to drop IE11 (when will Google remove IE11 support from Youtube?), the only reason to keep those tools will be JSX, which is frankly a minor convenience compared to the rest of React, and there are multiple alternatives to it that are not that terrible. [2]

Apart from that, WebPack and Babel are extremely hit-and-miss and terrible slow for anything but small-ish projects.

If you're doing SaaS or enterprise, chances are most of your customer-base is already 99.9% on Chrome or, in the worst case, in enterprise Windows-centric companies, Edge and that 0.01% is just waiting for something to tip them off.

I really can't wait to get rid of those two shitshows. Or maybe replace them with something actually useful, like Typescript compiled directly to modules.

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[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/domz / https://www.npmjs.com/package/htm / https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-hyperscript

[chrischen]

Babel is there so you can write your code with the latest Javascript features and separate your written code from what is actually deployed. JSX and IE11 are a subset of problems that this type of abstraction can solve.

This is miles better than the previous alternative: manually importing shims or adding in css prefixes. Babel and webpack also enable macros and static code analysis tools so you can write code in "inefficient" ways that's more readable, and automatically generate more performant code automatically.

Browsers are still split, even if considering only desktop users. If you add in mobile users then all those iOS people are using Safari, not Chrome.

And because of this fragmentation you can't expect the latest ES features to be usable on day one. So you'll always want Babel so you can write the code the way you want, and have platform targeting be a separate concern.

It sounds like you believe that we should be writing very platform specific code for the web, which is a bad practice in general. Nobody should write platform specific code. Leave that to the compiler.

[ratww]

Nope. You're the one advocating targeting a specific platform, and it's called Babel.

What I'm advocating is targeting evergreen browsers whenever possible: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and their forks. They already have most ES6 features. Even Safari has great ES6 support. iOS is known for being very up to date. Fragmentation in Javascript is a thing of the past, as long as you only use features available for +90% of the people on caniuse.com.

If you're targeting evergreen browsers you can already write the latest Javascript, and would only need Babel for something like JSX. All those browsers have async/await, ES6 modules (aka import), arrow functions, and destructuring.

To separate your written code from what is actually deployed is much more of a con than a pro. I'd rather not need a compilation step if possible. My time is valuable. Babel and Webpack are slow as a dog for non-toy projects.

Manually importing shims are a thing of the past when you're targeting evergreen browsers. You can use something like Polyfill.io for edge cases, and it will cover the small number of

CSS prefixes have nothing to do with Babel or Webpack, they're normally handled by tools like PostCSS. Nothing to do with Javascript. Static Analysis is normally handled by tools like ESLint that can use Babel but can be completely decoupled from the compilation step. Or Typescript, which actually brings a lot to the table compared to Babel.

Again, this might be hard: maybe you need to handle customers with IE11. But to not need Babel is something we should aim for.

I honestly can't wait for Babel to be 100% unnecessary and to die. It is valuable in a world where Internet Explorer exists, but there is zero advantage in using it when it's unnecessary.