Replace `acorn` parser for `babylon`?
zdychacek opened this issue · comments
Hi,
I came across a problem when node-detective
cannot operate on ES2015+ source code.
This is not a problem solely related to this package. The same problem applies to node-syntax-error
package which is used in browserify
pipeline.
I can see a clear problem in the fact, that some packages used by browserify
internally depend on acorn
parser.
This parser dependency is limiting e.g. for using browserify
in conjuction with babelify
in such situations when you don't want to transpile all the source code down to ES5.
For instance, let's say you don't want to transpile those syntax features, which are already natively supported by browsers, e.g. object spread operator in current Chrome. And now comes the problem with browserify syntax check and module dependecies parsing via module-deps
-> node-detective
dependency, all caused by code containing syntax features not parseable using acorn
parser. It this case with ...
operator.
Don't you think it would make sense to replace the parser and be more aligned with babel
ecosystem?
Cheers,
Ondrej
PS: The same issue is being solved in these issues in Webpack project:
Implemented in my fork: https://github.com/zdychacek/node-detective
I can create PR.
node-detective
has ES2017 support enabled already. On the specific point of object spread it is a ES2018 feature and only landed in Node 8.3.
Perhaps it would be simpler to just bump Acorn’s options to ecmaVersion
to 9?
@casr But what about non-standard features (stage < 4) which are already supported through Babel transformations?
Optional chaining operator and do expressions, to name a few.
I don't think browserify should support nonstandard features. You would not be able to use them anyway after bundling without first applying babel to the result, so you might as well use babelify first.
Note that most (all?) browserify packages now use acorn-node which has support for the latest features, and will match Node syntax with parser plugins if necessary.