Does Laravel Mix support ES8?

Question

I'm compiling my javascript files with Laravel mix, and as I am not very knowledgeable yet on Babel and package.json, I want to ask if Laravel Mix supports ES8, especially async/await?

If I try it, I can't tell if Mix is transpiling async/await to ES5 or if async/await is simply supported by my browser, which is the latest version. I still want it to be transpiled to ES2015 so the application will still works on browsers that only support ES5.

Depurative

Laravel Mix uses babel under the hood, if the correct plugins are added to babel the async/await syntax is supported. I'm currently investigating how to do this, I'll let you know. – Angelika

@Angelika great, any help would be appreciated. Excited to know how your investigation goes, I'm stumped as I don't know where to start looking, I've Googled a lot but to no avail. – Depurative

Answer 1

async / await with Laravel Mix:

If you use Laravel Mix out of the Box and use async and await you get the following error message:

Uncaught ReferenceError: regeneratorRuntime is not defined

But Laravel Mix uses Babel to support ES2015. We can customise the compilation if we need to.

To get async / await working, add the file .babelrc to your root directory with this content:

{
  "presets": ["es2015", "stage-3"],
  "plugins": [
    "transform-runtime"
  ]
}

And install the needed npm packages:

npm install babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-stage-3 babel-plugin-transform-runtime --save-dev

The important thing (which caused the error) is the transform-runtime plugin. It is not shipped with Laravel Mix, but you need it in order to get the async / await feature working.

ES8:

As you have seen above, you can use different preset stages in Babel. With them you can use features that are included in ES8 or later. For example stage-3 brings the async / await feature.

They have an overview of the stages on their website.

Aggappe

It's recommended that you use babel-preset-env. It contains both es2015 & stage-3. Then you just need ["env"] – Dozier