wrt. Base64 VLQ: source maps are text and compressible via gzip. Anyone know if there are any links to discussion about the trade-off made making the more complex and less human accessible?
Having to go to the trouble of understanding and implementing Base64 VLQ (since basically nobody uses it) myself just to prototype a source map implementation for my compiler makes me less likely to actually get around to it, because it's one more complete unknown in a format that seems to have almost nothing resembling working deployments or documentation to speak of. It really sucks that the best source of informat…
From what I've heard, the Mozilla source-map repo is your best bet on "how to create source maps":
https://github.com/mozilla/source-map
It's what Traceur (Google's ES6/ES.Next transpiler) uses under the hood.