Convert codebase to babel

[jbovenschen]

Co-creator of react-pdf here again.

As we discussed in #24, it would be beneficial to both of us if we convert the codebase to babel.

Can we already start with it? Or what is a good strategy to do so?

Happy if we can help.

[devongovett]

I had started a while back on this. I was using decaffeinate. Worked well for fontkit.

[jbovenschen]

@devongovett Thanks for giving the pointers. Will try this weekend to convert the repository to use babel instead of coffee script.

[GoNode5]

pls no babel... I use successfully Pdfkit for years on a NodeJs Server. Don't need another layer. If so I would prefer Typescript...

[jbovenschen]

@GoNode5 I don't see what would be a problem for the end user if we use babel? It just compiles down to be compatible with lower versions of node, and if there is no transpile step needed anymore we could just plug out the babel convert step. If we would use something like typescript we would always need a compile step.

You as an end-user can just use the library as you did before, there will be no changes because of it in the API.

[GoNode5]

Never worked or need for Babel. Frontend Angular, no React so that's my bias for Typescript. Javascript will stay forever. Babel / Typescript (like Coffeescript) will (should..) be obsolete on some point in time. Think E6 made huge progress. I don't see myself as an end-user...
But the conversion to JS is appreciated. So already thanks for your work!!!

[devongovett]

Closing for #707.