// the take
A Babel alternative from 2016 that transforms async/await syntax into ES6 generators, built so you could use async functions in Node 0.12+ and older browsers before native support existed. Zero-config, minimal dependencies, fast transform — meant for people who wanted async/await now and didn't want to pull in all of Babel.
The 'dead-simple transform' approach is genuinely nice: it preserves line numbers for sane stack traces and emits a tiny (~200-500 byte) runtime helper instead of a bulky polyfill. The require-hook and async-node REPL are convenient for quick dev-time use. Async generator / for-await-of support (via Async Iterators) was ahead of its time for a transform-only tool.
Last commit is from February 2018 — async/await has been natively supported in Node and every major browser since 2017, so the entire premise of the tool is obsolete; there is no reason to add this as a dependency today. No TypeScript support, no JSX, no modern ESM handling — it only does one narrow transform and was never extended. Depends on an unmaintained parser (acorn-based, pinned old version) which means it will break or mis-parse on any JS using newer syntax. Effectively unmaintained: no releases, no issue response, no CI badge that still resolves.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →