Not sure why you're being down voted, your comment is fine I think.
What's worse than having specific parsers, transformers, and generators – I think – is not having an AST standard. If there was a common standard for ES ASTs, including extension points, then it becomes a lot easier to write tools that aren't specific to a tool chain but specific to a data structure. I could use the Babylon parser, but do transforms with Rollup and optimizations with Uglify (obviously provided those tools had APIs that take/return ASTs.)
As it stands, there's a varying degree of lock-in when using these tools, making them more difficult to compose. That's a shame I think.
You're right -- it would be nice to have a standard AST for ES, which is what you have in languages like Python, so that tools can be built around it more easily and without lock-in. This would also help accomplish my idea of helping the community rather than one tech specifically. I saw some other comment that mentioned ESTree but I guess that didn't go anywhere... sucks.
What's worse than having specific parsers, transformers, and generators – I think – is not having an AST standard. If there was a common standard for ES ASTs, including extension points, then it becomes a lot easier to write tools that aren't specific to a tool chain but specific to a data structure. I could use the Babylon parser, but do transforms with Rollup and optimizations with Uglify (obviously provided those tools had APIs that take/return ASTs.)
As it stands, there's a varying degree of lock-in when using these tools, making them more difficult to compose. That's a shame I think.