Understand how polyfill works in your Babel configuration

In front-end development, Babel and polyfill have become indispensable. However, some people argue they’re symbolic of black boxification, and it’s hard to know how they’re working in the build process and the differences between them.

In this piece, I’ll walk you through how polyfill works in a Babel configuration.

Dependencies

We’ll use these dependencies in this piece.

• @babel/cli@7.12.10
• @babel/core@7.12.10
• @babel/preset-env@7.12.11
• core-js-compat@3.8.1

Overview

1\. What's Babel?
2\. What's a polyfill?
3\. What are the differences between Babel and a polyfill?
4\. The process of injecting a polyfill in Babel
5\. Does Babel handle all polyfills?
6\. Why does IE11 crash in your app?
7\. Conclusion

#nodejs #programming #javascript