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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

This might be true, but Babel is a big, important project. I’d have expected performance to be something they’ve invested in. That may be wrong.

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The Babel team is great.... and they're also tiny, overworked, and underfunded. (See some of Henry Zhu's recent conference talks on dealing with being an OSS maintainer for background.)

I think Babel 7 had some perf improvements (including tweaks contributed by Benedikt Meurer from the v8 team), but I don't think they've ever had time to focus on just improving perf.

Yep there's been various PRs for perf over the years but it's never been a focus per-se, and we've had help from various people including the v8 team https://twitter.com/left_pad/status/927554660508028929. Haha yeah no one wants to hear about open source sustainability in a thread about asking that tools be correct/fast/easy to use at the same time :D

It's true, speed is not really a concern on my mind at the moment - rather that we have enough people even willing to contribute back at all

Trust me, I am well aware that even big open source projects don’t get the resourcing they deserve. Everyone always has to make do. Babel is a fantastic project.

haha oops I totally wasn't looking at who I commenting with, definitely agree! Thanks!

No oops required! I should have been more careful in my initial phrasing. I certainly don’t want to imply that you should be doing even more work!

Yeah, those kind of one-off contributions was what I was meaning. You are 100% right with regards to expectations, and I don’t mean to imply that they should have. Only that it’s a bit more likely than some random projetct that nobody uses.

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