Investigate replacing Babel with TypeScript compiler - Githubissues

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Investigate replacing Babel with TypeScript compiler #1550

Open ZhangYiJiang opened 5 years ago

ZhangYiJiang commented 5 years ago

Since we've moved to TypeScript, we may want to try to use tsc not just as a type checker but also for transpilation, by replacing Babel and using ts-loader in Webpack

Possible advantages

Smaller code because by having type information TSC may be able to produce more optimal JS
Less config - instead of having to configure TS and Babel separately we now only have TS to configure
Better development performance - instead of running two tools, run just one

Possible disadvantages

Less flexible - it seems like TSC doesn't have the fine grained browser targeting that Bebel's present-env allows, which means its output may be less optimal

We should try setting this up on a test branch and compare the output

li-kai commented 5 years ago

I don't think this will be in our focus in any time, due to TSC's inability to target browser runtimes. This issue will be here for a while.