Compatibility with ember-auto-import

[alexlafroscia]

ember-auto-import currently assumes that ember-cli-babel is present in the host application. Babel is used by ember-auto-import to parse the files in your application and find the imports.

https://github.com/ef4/ember-auto-import/blob/e7d34659666ece3a33c822971e12720680b86c89/packages/ember-auto-import/ts/analyzer.ts#L144

The host application's Babel configuration is used to ensure that ember-auto-import processes files with any custom configuration you might have applied to Babel (for things like custom syntax, I assume).

I have opened an issue on ember-auto-import to see if there's a path forward. That issue can be found here:

embroider-build/ember-auto-import#317

Two general ideas I've had are:

1. Expose whatever is needed from this addon so that it could be used to parse the files instead of Babel
   • I'm not sure how much this would make sense, as I do not think that esbuild provides a parsing API
2. Use some default Babel configuration inside ember-auto-import if ember-cli-babel is not present in the host app
   • Since esbuild does not support plugins at this time, it's likely we could make some assumptions about the syntax of the files so that they can be parsed by ember-auto-import using a pre-defined Babel configuration that would work with esbuild
   • This could get tricky around TypeScript support

With how important ember-auto-import is to the modern Ember ecosystem, I see this as a blocker to an initial release of these packages.

[vlascik]

There now is a babel plugin for esbuild at https://github.com/nativew/esbuild-plugin-babel

[alexlafroscia]

Hmm, that's interesting!

So maybe we could use esbuild plus the legacy decorators plug-in... I'll have to check that out!