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Remove dependency on babel #434
Description
I have created some projects using create-react-app-typescipt, and would like to get rid of babel as a dependency.
From #394 I have understood that babel is not (meant to be?) used in this project at all. However, this package seems to have dependencies on "babel-jest", "babel-loader" and "babel-preset-react-app", which cause "babel-core" and all its subdependencies to be included. I understand that babel is an ES2015+ transpiler and should therefore have no real use in a pure TypeScript project, or having a dependency on it should at most be optional.
I did a quick experiment to see if babel is really required, and turns out you can indeed create a new react app and get away with removing almost all babel-related packages (by hand) from node_modules and keep a working setup.
For some reason npm start command still requires these 4 babel modules to be present:
babel-code-frame
babel-loader
babel-preset-react-app
babel-runtime
npm run test probably requires more.
What is going on here?
Activity
DorianGrey commentedon Oct 25, 2018
The statement you mentioned isn't an official one, and it's ... wrong.
Just take a look at the
webpackconfigurations ...E.g.:
create-react-app-typescript/config/webpack.config.dev.js
Lines 160 to 169 in eb34688
It's still allowed to import and use
jsfiles, which might be quite common during migrations. At least there were quite a lot of requests for this. Sincerequire.resolveis used to avoid clunkywebpackmessage when a loader could not be found, it is enforced that these packages are present - they are resolved before the build.babel-code-frameis used by the type checker to generate a code frame for each reported error.babel-jestis referenced byjestby default, and thus cannot be omitted.danielkcz commentedon Nov 2, 2018
Isn't TypeScript capable of transforming JavaScript as well? It's just a file without types, so it shouldn't be a problem, right?
That said, if we would remove Babel completely, we would close the path for
babel-plugin-macroswhich is extremely handy and used by more and more projects now and included in CRA2. However, in the and it means that we need to usebabel-loaderfor TypeScript files as well.