Re: miniSphere 4.5.3
Reply #1515 –
For the next release I'm switching the default ES6 transpiler from Babel to TypeScript, since the latter is a lot faster. TS is a strict superset of vanilla JS, so there shouldn't be any issue with the transition, but of course I'll make sure to do a lot of in-house testing before putting out a release with the change.
By the way when I say "a lot faster" I mean
a lot faster - build time for Spectacles went from what felt like about 30s down to 5s. It's quite a dramatic difference.
TS with type-checking is a different story entirely - that is SLOW.
edit: Full rebuild of Radnen's Blockman takes ~13s on my Skylake i7 using TypeScript. That took over a minute with Babel.
edit 2: Hm, that's unfortunate. TypeScript will not convert ES6 generator functions to an ES5-compatible form; Babel does. Generators are quite useful, e.g. as iterators.
It might worth the tradeoff for a faster build though... hm... A future release of TypeScript will support downlevel transpilation of generators. So this is a non-issue in the long run.