How to use esbuild instead of bable and swc

[nicomouss]

We have been using esbuild in our tech stack for couple of years, to transpile our codebase written in typescript.

Now we would like to integrate lingui.

The thing is we are not using babel, nor swc, so are we right to assume that lingui is not esbuild-compatible at the moment regarding the use of the t macro ? (As the documentation says Non-macro use is also supported, but it's not common. It's recommended to use macros., we are trying to use macros ...)

Having this simple index.ts file:

import { i18n } from "@lingui/core";
import { t } from "@lingui/core/macro";
import { messages } from "./locales/fr.ts";

i18n.load("fr", messages);
i18n.activate("fr");

t`Hello World!`;
// becomes "Salut le monde!"

const name = "Fred";
t`My name is ${name}`;
// becomes "Je m'appelle Fred"

pnpm lingui extract works fine
pnpm lingui compile --typescript works fine

Running the index.ts file does not work (in this case running the file using tsx which uses esbuild under the hood): pnpm tsx ./src.index.ts

Is there an esbuild plugin available somewhere, like the ones available for babel and swc ?

[timofei-iatsenko]

There is a esbuild plugin, which is basically will run babel for files with macro. That means it will slow down esbuild.

[nicomouss]

@timofei-iatsenko Thanks for your feedback. The reason we chose to use esbuild was indeed to get very fast builds, so going back to something slower (Babel) would make no sense in our case.

I guess then the only way to use lingui in an esbuild context would be to use lingui non-macro-usage.

[timofei-iatsenko]

You can try it with babel though, you might be surprisied that it wouldn't be too much slow.