babel-traverse and react-docgen about react-docgen

[fkling]

interesting thing here was on ASTExplorer the outputted structure was the same - which makes me think I'm probably missing something trivial

The ASTs are probably the same, but the NodePath's may not?

Is there something I'm missing with the paths provided by babel-traverse that would make them work with recast or are they fundamentally different api's meaning they would need some sort of conversion step?

I don't know that much about the NodePath implement babel-traverse. But from writing a custom Babel plugin I can say that they appear to be very different than recast's NodePaths.

Also, out of interest, wondering how the decision is made to use something like recast over babel-traverse (considering babylon is already used as the parser)? Guess this may be a timing thing when work was actually started on this!

Pretty much, yes. I actually wrote jscodeshift two years ago. Babel didn't exist back than.

Also, is it maybe the plan to move to babel (making assumptions since it's FB managed now)?

I don't have any plans in this direction. recast works well for us as it is and I believe that a conversion is worth the effort (not enough gain).

I'm looking to re-use a bunch of logic I've already written as babel based traversals and am desperately hoping I can take advantage of docgen in the least ugliest manner possible.

docgen uses babylon v5. If you are using v6, then that could explain some of the differences. But aside that, there shouldn't be an issue using a babylon AST with docgen/recast. I'm happy to provide an API that accepts an AST (instead of code).

Maybe if you provide concrete examples which cause issues, we can solve them?

[fkling]

I'm closing this since I guess there doesn't seem to be anything actionable here.