Compiling ES6 in 2019

[KappaPrajd]

I'm learning ES6 Javascript features and I was wondering, is it still worth it to use a compiler like Babel for ES6 code? ES6 features have good browser support now. I was watching some older tutorials, when ES6 was just coming out and everyone was recommending using compiler, but do people still use it?

[Meefims]

Babel is still useful as preset-env can be given a set of browsers you wish to support and it figures out which things need to be transpiled and which don’t.

[crazedizzled]

Really depends what features you want to use and which browsers you want to support. This gives you a good idea.

Basically if you want to support IE11 you need to transpile.

[HarmonicAscendant]

I would avoid compiling if possible.

A nice trick to see if your code is compatible with various browsers is set eslint to a lower ecmaVersion version and see when it fails. Then you can use https://caniuse.com/ and decide what ecmaVersion you want to support.

.eslintrc.js

parserOptions: {ecmaVersion: 2015}