Hacker News Reader

Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

I read about stuff like this and then wonder whether I'll ever be able to use it since target browser platforms are so fragmented.

View on HN

You can use it now if you preprocess with babel - https://babeljs.io/

You can also use it in Node.js if you install the Babel require extension, or run under the babel-node wrapper. It's not super convenient, though; I'm looking forward to a time when Node has full ES6 support.

It's not ideal in Node but I haven't found it to be that bad - I've gotten into the habit of making a bootstrap.js file that just has:

    require('babel/register')
    require('./main.js')

and carrying on like nothing ever happened.

Absolutely. I talked about this in the Babel chat room, though, and was told it was an antipattern, without being explained why. I still don't know why.

Apparently some people prefer to build a distribution of the entire project with Babel on deploy, which is fine, but it does cause an impedance mismatch with how projects are developed on the developer's machine; obviously both ways have to work.

A real problem with babel/register is the interface for including node modules, which I think needs improvement. You can't selectively include individual modules because the {only} option isn't additive, it replaces the default setting.

Maybe it is an anti-pattern because it alters the default - I mean, I guess it means it's processing node modules through the transpiler unnecessarily as well? I can't say I've experienced a performance hit myself.

Babel doesn't touch node_modules only you explicitly include it. Browserify lets you add this to an NPM package's package.json:

  "browserify": {
    "transform": [
      "babelify"
    ]
  }

...which is great, but Babel doesn't have anything like it for server-side stuff.

Its not an anti pattern unless you are writing a libray. Just remember that your application is recompiled by babel every single time you run it and on every process restart (if any), which may or may not be unacceptably slow.

Thanks for the link!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com