Babel macros maybe?

[kepta]

Babel recently launched first party support for macros. It is still a relatively new feature and might have some things yet to be polished, but I can see ways it can improve our babel-plugin-transform-jsxtreme-markdown. We are already creating a fake import of md to use this plugin, babel-plugin-macros formalises this system and should make it easier to reason about.

[weyert]

Yes, that would be fantastic that should make it possible to use it with CRA without the need of react-app-rewrited :)

[weyert]

Looks like it might already exists https://github.com/mapbox/jsxtreme-markdown/issues/33 ?

[davidtheclark]

@kepta what do you think of the prior discussion, about keeping the macro out of this repo?

[kepta]

Looks like it might already exists #33 ?

Ah, thanks for flagging that @weyert. I forgot babel-macros has been lying around for a while now.

@kepta what do you think of the prior discussion,about keeping the macro out of this repo?

@davidtheclark reading https://github.com/mapbox/jsxtreme-markdown/issues/25 and especially this line

Seems "macro" is the right term for what this Babel plugin is doing!

I agree what this plugin is doing fits more in line with what Babel folks want us to call macros. I like the explicitness of being able to import the macro without having to worry about tweaking .babelrc or any other global configuration. I believe even users would benefit from consuming the macro by simply doing an npm install and using it directly in their Javascript files (provided that they have properly setup babel-macros).

I kind of inch towards keeping the macro inside the repo and maintain it ourself. Something like:

// Option 1: continue using the same package
import md from 'babel-plugin-transform-jsxtreme-markdown/md.macro';
// Option 2: if we want to have a separate package
import md from '@mapbox/jsxtreme-markdown.macro';

As Babel 7 ecosystem matures, we can make the macro the preferred way of consuming jsxtreme and the plugin could continue to exist to prevent breaking existing repositories consuming it.

[weyert]

I have been trying to use this import md from 'babel-plugin-transform-jsxtreme-markdown/md.macro' in my CRAv2 application but it's not working for me. Besides adding the package 'babel-plugin-transform-jsxtreme-markdown to my dev dependencies?

Do I need to do something special to make this work?

[davidtheclark]

@weyert There is no Babel macro implementation right now.

[weyert]

Hmm, that's confusing then!