NPM – "is-even", 160k weekly downloads

Re:NPM – "is-even", 160k weekly downloads by mintplant on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @01:20PM (#29244341)

For a long time, Babel plugins were entirely smoke-and-mirrors. If you looked under the hood at the source code of a "plugin" package, all it would contain was something like:

    require('babel').____secret____.enablePluginFoo = true;

There was no actual plugin API, just selectively-enabled logic hardcoded into the main packages. The whole thing was fake-it-til-you-make-it.

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Re:NPM – "is-even", 160k weekly downloads by akiselev on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @01:35PM (#29244596)

That's actually pretty clever, in a "all hail the dark lord Cthulu" kind of way.

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Re:NPM – "is-even", 160k weekly downloads by acemarke on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @04:09PM (#29246384)

For built-in syntax parsing, yes - those official plugins just told the parser to enable those specific bits of syntax.

Actual plugins for non-standard syntax were all real AST visitor-based modifications, though.

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Re:NPM – "is-even", 160k weekly downloads by mintplant on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @08:05PM (#29260947)

I found this out some years ago while investigating how I might write my own Babel plugin for some non-standard syntax. At the time there were no such facilities available, only the hidden built-in parser flags.

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