Babel

JavaScript is an evolving language, with new features and syntax being added every year. While modern browsers are quick to adopt these new features, older browsers may not support them. This creates a compatibility problem: you want to use the latest, most productive features, but you also need your website to work for as many users as possible. Babel is the solution to this problem. Babel is a JavaScript transpiler. A transpiler is a tool that reads source code written in one programming language and produces equivalent code in another language. In this case, Babel reads your modern JavaScript code (ES6, ES2020, etc.) and converts it into an older, more widely-supported version of JavaScript, typically ES5. This allows you to write your code using features like arrow functions, `let`/`const`, classes, and `async/await`, and be confident that Babel will transform it into code that can run in virtually any browser. Babel works through a system of plugins and presets. Plugins are for specific language features (e.g., a plugin for arrow functions), while presets are collections of plugins (e.g., `@babel/preset-env`, which automatically includes the plugins needed for all features in the latest ECMAScript standard). Babel is an essential tool in the modern development toolchain, bridging the gap between new language features and browser compatibility.