Babel's Funding Plans

November 8, 2019

One of the greatest strengths of open source software is that it is open and free for anyone to contribute. This also leads to one of its greatest challenges, which is to support consistent, sustainable maintenance.

Babel isn't a company. As mentioned in the 7.0.0 post, the all-volunteer Babel team (sans Henry) has been doing its best to steward the project and handle all the expectations of the community. We're glad that we have continued to make releases, but even keeping up-to-date with reported issues is difficult to manage, let alone our integrations with other tools, new proposals, and effect on the greater ecosystem.

In March 2018, Henry left his job to start working on securing more funding for Babel. After a lot of work and support from the community, the team was able to fund Henry as a full-time maintainer.

This has been a big win for the team, but we're finding that it is not enough.

7.7.0 Released: Error recovery and TypeScript 3.7

November 5, 2019

Nicolò Ribaudo

Today we are releasing Babel 7.7.0!

This release includes new parser features like top-level await (await x(), Stage 3) and Flow enum declarations (Flow proposal). And now, @babel/parser has the option of recovering from certain syntax errors!

We've also added support for TypeScript 3.7: Babel can parse and transform private class fields with type annotations, public class fields annotations defined using the declare keyword, type assertion function signatures and template literals in enum declarations.

Babel now understands three new configuration files: babel.config.json, babel.config.cjs and .babelrc.cjs, which behave the same as babel.config.js and .babelrc.js files.

Lastly, Babel 7.7.0 uses 20% less memory than 7.6.0.

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

7.6.0 Released: Private static accessors and V8 intrinsic syntax

September 5, 2019

Nicolò Ribaudo

We just released a new minor Babel version!

It includes support for static private accessors in classes, and parser support for the V8 intrinsics syntax. We also fixed a bunch of long-standing issues related to TDZ handling, and improved support for do-expressions. You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

7.5.0 Released: dynamic import and F# pipelines

July 3, 2019

Nicolò Ribaudo

Today we are releasing Babel 7.5.0!

This release includes improved support for a few ECMAScript proposals: the F# variant of the Stage 1 pipeline operator and an official plugin for the Stage 4 dynamic import() proposal (along with preset-env support). It also has support for TypeScript namespaces (experimental) and for Browserslist's default query in preset-env.

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

The Babel Podcast

July 2, 2019

Henry Zhu

Today we're announcing the The Babel Podcast!

You probably use Babel, directly or as a dependency. But do you ever wonder who works on it? Henry Zhu chats with other members of the team, TC39, and the JS community about the future of JavaScript and how it's all maintained. Please join us in babbling about Babel (and everything else)!

Subscribe with: Apple | Google | Spotify | RSS

7.4.0 Released: core-js 3, static private methods and partial application

March 19, 2019

Nicolò Ribaudo

Today we are releasing Babel 7.4.0!

This release includes support for TypeScript 3.4, the proposal for partial application in function calls, and static private methods.

We added support for meaningful parenthesized expressions in @babel/parser, and also made it more spec compliant than ever!

Last but not least, both @babel/preset-env and @babel/transform-runtime now support core-js@3, and @babel/template has some sweet new syntax!

You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

7.3.0 Released: Named capturing groups, private instance accessors and smart pipelines

January 21, 2019

Nicolò Ribaudo

After over 80 commits, the latest Babel minor release is here!

This release includes support for named capturing groups in regular expressions, private instance accessors, the smart pipeline operator and a bunch of improvements to TypeScript parsing. You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

7.2.0 Released: Private Instance Methods

December 3, 2018

Nicolò Ribaudo

We just released a new minor version of Babel!

This release includes support for private instance methods and a bunch of bug fixes regarding Flow and TypeScript types. You can read the whole changelog on GitHub.

TC39 Standards Track Decorators in Babel

September 17, 2018

Nicolò Ribaudo

Babel 7.1.0 finally supports the new decorators proposal: you can try it out by using the @babel/plugin-proposal-decorators plugin 🎉.

7.1.0 Released: Decorators, Private Static Fields

September 17, 2018

Henry Zhu

There's already another release! 7.1.0 includes support for Stage 2 Decorators and adds support for Stage 3 Private Static Fields as well as some various bug fixes.

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