Embracing Black Magic: The Power of Code Transpilation

Who doesn't like magic? Despite the pretense of strictly rational engineers, programmers love magic, and JavaScript programmers above all. We love when the code surprises us, when things happen ""behind the scenes,"" when features work with a touch of mystery. Code transformers are one of these magical tools — they are programs that rewrite other programs in order to grant them special abilities. Intriguing as they are, they've been with us for a long time as minifiers, obfuscators, and transpilers. In this talk, we'll take a peek into the world of source code transformers, focusing on JavaScript. We’ll examine basic terminology and concepts, and learn how transpilers work and how they're built. We'll take a close look at some popular projects, such as Babel, TypeScript, and the CoffeeScript compiler. You’ll get a glimpse of how to write your own custom plugins for some of these tools. You should come out of this talk not only with practical knowledge, but also inspired by fresh and surprising ideas of what you can do with programs that transform other programs."
Length: 32:50
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Recorded on 2016-06-27 at You Gotta Love Frontend Conference
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