Integrating Babel

In the last decade, JavaScript ascended from a simple scripting language to the most used programming language in the whole world. With the increased popularity, the language has also gotten a lot of interesting features. Unfortunately, it always takes a while until the latest features are made available in all implementations. The problem gets worse if we want to use the latest language features in old implementations anyway.

This is a problem that has been known by frontend developers for years – after all, the version and variety of the browser used cannot be predetermined by the developer. Only the user makes this decision – and an older browser may not understand some of the modern features that the developer wants to use. In Node.js, we don’t have exactly the same problem – as we can theoretically decide the version of Node.js – but it can be a similar issue if Node.js does not have the latest language features or if we...