Babel is a free and open-source JavaScript transpiler. A transpiler (source-to-source compilers) is a tool that reads source code which is written in one programming language and produces the equivalent code in another programming language. Babel is mainly used to convert ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) or above version code into a backward compatible version (ES5) of JavaScript that can run in any browser along with older one. It is a popular tool for using the latest features of the JavaScript programming language.
Babel uses polyfills to provide support for features that are missing from JavaScript environments. For example, static methods like Array.from and built-ins like Promise are only available in ES6 or above version, but we can use it in older environments if we use a Babel polyfill.
TypeScript is an open-source pure object-oriented programing language. It is a strongly typed superset of JavaScript which compiles to plain JavaScript. We cannot run a TypeScript program on the browser directly. It needs a compiler to compile and generate in JavaScript file, which runs on the browser directly. We can save the TypeScript source file by using ".ts" extension. TypeScript is developed and maintained by Microsoft under the Apache 2 license.
We can use Typescript for both server-side and client-side web applications. It is also used in the development of large-scale web applications. It adds support to the different features present in ECMAScript which is maintained by a TC39 committee of the ECMA group.
Anders Hejlsberg developed TypeScript. The first version of Typescript come for the public in the month of 1 October 2012. After two years of internal development at Microsoft, the new version of TypeScript 0.9 was released in 2013. The current version of TypeScript is TypeScript 3.4.5 which was released on 24 April 2019.
We can understand the main differences between TypeScript and Babel from the below table.
| SN | TypeScript | Babel |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | TypeScript is an open-source pure object-oriented programing language. It is a strongly typed superset of JavaScript which compiles to plain JavaScript. | Babel is a free and open-source JavaScript transpiler. It is mainly used to convert ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) or above version code into a backward compatible version (ES5) of JavaScript that can run on any browser. |
| 2. | It is a programming language. | It is a tool (transpiler). |
| 3. | TypeScript provides type checking of data types. | Babel does not care about types. |
| 4. | TypeScript compiles an entire project at once. | Babel compiles only one file at a time. |
| 5. | Typescript enables developers to use excellent typing capabilities. It is suitable for a large application. | Babel is suitable for developers who want to write plain JavaScript code using the latest language features. |
| 6. | TypeScript is additional add-ons to JS, which allow for strong typing. | Babel is a transpiler (tool) that takes newer JS syntax features as input and returns older/more reliable syntax as output. |
| 7. | It is developed and maintained by Microsoft. | It is closely linked to ECMA Technical Committee 39 (TC39). |
| 8. | TypeScript compiles decorators directly. | Babel does not compile decorators directly. It has a legacy mode to compile the decorators with the old version. |
