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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

This is good news but I'm a little confused, if Io.js supports ES6 why do you need 6to5?

ES6 support is not a binary thing. IO.js has a newer version of V8 that supports more ES6 features than node.js's V8 version, but its not even close to all of ES6. to 6to5 shims the rest of the ES6 featureset. see here for more info: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Thank you for this! I was a little confused.

if i read this correctly, even 6to5 supports 77% of ES6, which is interesting.

too bad its taking so long, i cant wait until full support comes to browsers

yes, I believe most of the missing things are things that cannot be shimmed, such as typed arrays.

With projects like 6to5, you don't have to wait.

This doesn't explain it, why do you need to compile ES6 at run-time? Plugin authors should compile before distributing.

This would annoy me as a user, I don't care that you really want the await/async feature. ES5 is not that bad. It's not like the difference between Lua and Vimscript. Just use ES5 or compile your ES6 prior to distributing.

Exactly.

To be fair you could (and I have...) say the same thing about coffee script.

Just let the plugin authors write in whatever-the-heck they want and compile it to js, and distribute as js, like everyone else.

On the bright side, this shows that the github guys are thinking about things other than coffee script at last. Thank goodness.

You compile ES6 at run-time in developer mode - ES6 compiles are cached and installing a plugin precompiles it on your machine automatically. However, if you're developing a plugin, ES6 will be compiled on-the-fly.

The summary is, It Just Works™, efficiently.

Cool, I retract my complaint then.

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