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Comment by arcatek | Hacker News Reader

I think that your benchmarks are a bit off: instead of comparing 5to6 with Traceur + Runtime, you should compare 5to6 + <polyfills> versus Traceur + Runtime (or 5to6 vs vanilla Traceur).

Same, the Op/Sec doesn't tell us much about how much time is actually required to compile a significant codebase.

Anyway, I really like these projects (especially since I'm working on an ES6 library), so good luck ! Is it possible to live-compile ES6 scripts, like with Traceur + ES6-Module-Loader ?

Finally, I note that 5to6 doesn't use ES6 itself (when the Traceur build process self-compile, for example).

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> I think that your benchmarks are a bit off: instead of comparing 5to6 with Traceur + Runtime, you should compare 5to6 + <polyfills> versus Traceur + Runtime (or 5to6 vs vanilla Traceur).

The only polyfill that is required is Symbol/Symbol.iterator and that's only required if you use a for-of loop. I included the runtimes in the stats specifically to show the disadvantages to having them. I agree with you that it is slightly off and I'll work to improve it.

> Same, the Op/Sec doesn't tell us much about how much time is actually required to compile a significant codebase.

I struggled to find a significant ES6 codebase to test against. If you know of one please let me know!

> Anyway, I really like these projects (especially since I'm working on an ES6 library), so good luck ! Is it possible to live-compile ES6 scripts, like with Traceur + ES6-Module-Loader ?

I'm not familiar with that behaviour. Do you mean automatically watching and compiling on changes?

> Finally, I note that 5to6 doesn't use ES6 itself (when the Traceur build process self-compile, for example).

I may move to bootstrapping eventually although it seems like a hassle when I'm more than complacent to just write ES5.

> I struggled to find a significant ES6 codebase to test against. If you know of one please let me know!

One was just posted yesterday and made it to the front page:

http://virtjs.com/

"Modern - Virtjs has been made with the full power of ES6, the next iteration of the Javascript programming language. It gives us a pretty simple source code. We're one of the very first libraries to jump aboard!"

(That's mine! o/)

> I'm not familiar with that behaviour. Do you mean automatically watching and compiling on changes?

I mean that a javascript library would act as a gate to live-compile Javascript files on-the-fly.

For example, with ES6-Module-Loader[1], you can do something like this in your browser :

    <script>
        System.import('mymodule').then(function(m) {
            new m.q();
        }).catch(console.error.bind(console));
    </script>

'mymodule' can be an uncompiled ES6 module, the code will still work fine, because ES6-Module-Loader will get its content (XHR), resolve its dependencies, then pass everything to Traceur.

Obviously its main use is for debug purpose (since it does a request for each source file, which won't be great until HTTP 2), but it allows to have a full ES6 workflow, without any visible compilation pass.

[1] https://github.com/ModuleLoader/es6-module-loader

> 5to6

I think you mean 6to5.

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