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Welcome to the Babel Codebase
Babel is broken down into three parts:
- Parsing
- Transformation
- Generation
Parsing is the process of turning a piece of code into an ESTree spec compatible AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) which is a tree-like object of nodes that describes the code. This makes it easier to transform the code over direct string manpulation.
Transformation is the process of taking an AST and manipulating it into a new one. For example, Babel might take an ES2015 ArrowFunction and transform it into a normal Function which will work in ES5 environments.
Generation is the process of turning an AST back into code. After Babel is done transforming the AST, the generation takes over to return normal code.
Babel's parsing step is done by Acorn. However, because Babel is implementing future standards it maintains a fork of Acorn in order to do it's job. You can see that fork in the "acorn" folder.
The transformation and generation steps are both handled inside of the Babel codebase itself, which is in the "babel" folder here.