In the past few months Babel has been welcomed into several major communities such as Node, React, Ember, Backbone, Angular, Rails, and many others. We launched the Users page only a few weeks ago and it's really cool to see everyone that is using it. Companies like CloudFlare, Netflix, Mozilla, and Yahoo!. Projects like Ghost, Atom, Mapbox, and so many more.
We've seen tons of blog posts, talks, events, courses all about ES6+ using Babel, and official Babel tools have been downloaded nearly 2 million times.
Today we are making by far the largest release of Babel ever.
If you're upgrading from Babel 4.x please see the breaking changes.
This release includes the new ES7 proposals:
The entire internal traversal and transformation pipeline has undergone a rewrite that substantially increases flexibility and will allow many future pipeline performance optimisations.
This release also brings a plugin API, this allows consumers to plug in their own custom transformers to utilise the powerful transformation mechanisms that Babel has to offer.
You can view the complete CHANGELOG here.
And as usual if you run into any regressions please report them immediately.
TC39 Process
In this release you'll start to see us aligned with the TC39 process. The TC39 is the technical committee from ECMA that writes the ECMAScript standard. Their process is categorised into 5 stages:
- Stage 0 - Strawman
- Stage 1 - Proposal
- Stage 2 - Draft
- Stage 3 - Candidate
- Stage 4 - Finished
Proposals that are stage 2 or above are enabled in Babel by default. Now this does not mean that they're guaranteed to be included in future ECMAScript specifications or even Babel itself. Stage 2 is considered a good point for inclusion by default in Babel due to their relative maturity and need for critical proposal feedback.
Now let's dive into the changes we made to 5.0.
Contents: