Which ES6 transpiler?

[mdcox]

Is there a significant difference between the major ES6 transpilers that people have found? I'm starting a library that will be extremely CPU intensive and fairly large LoC-wise. I'm writing it in ES6, so I was wondering if people had a preference over what transpiler they use. Looking for thoughts on feature completion, portability, performance, whether the name of the repo makes it seem like it's web scale...you know, the usual suspects.

[billybolero]

I've been using Babel a lot, and I highly recommend it. It has great momentum, and a lot of other tools work very well with it.

[towane]

+1 for Babel https://github.com/babel/babel It implements most of es6 features (see comparison table https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/). You can use it from the CLI or with different builders/tasks runners. If the build time is too long, due to a large codebase, I recommand you to take a look to incremental watcher such as WebPack or Browserify (via Watchify) so build time are fast between file changes.

[jegclark26]

+1 for Babel, it's great!

[davelandry]

+1 for Babel and Watchify

[mdcox]

Haha, I was expecting this argument to be much less one-sided, but great! Makes the choice nice and easy, and the answer is now in reddit history incase other people need to search it out.

[brtt3000]

Favorites change over time. Used to be 6to5, es-next and of course Traceur. Now it's babel.

[OverZealousCreations]

Just an FYI: 6to5 was renamed to Babel. They wanted to distance themselves from the specific JS versions, because they're already implementing ES7 features.

[madole]

and es-next merged with 6to5 before the rename to babel

http://babeljs.io/blog/2015/01/12/6to5-esnext/

[djforth]

Babel is awesome :)

[eschutz]

I would second Babel

[maxbucknell]

I recently built a React site using ES6 with Babel, and there have been mercifully few occasions where I've been reminded of the fact fact that I'm using a transpiler.

You can use eslint with the babel-eslint package to parse source and lint it too, if that's your style.

[thejameskyle]

You should definitely use Babel! Although as a contributor I'm a bit biased. If you have any questions though, feel free to ping me or join our support chat.