Polyfills as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Polyfills as a Service

polyfills.io

67 pointsgrflynn15 comments

Author here. Haven't maintained this in a while. It's down due to some breaking changes in libraries and I haven't updated the code to handle it.

I also stopped using this as you could just use babel to automatically use whichever polyfill you use with babel-runtime. Saving a few kb is an overoptimization.

If you're interested in maintaining this project, let me know. I can add you to the GitHub organization.

Would be nice to have a note on the homepage indicating that this project has since been abandoned.

will do

This is a really great example of why not to use random CDN's just because it is convenient. Currently they are just serving internal server errors.

The problem is their origin not the CDN itself. The author is not responding and wont fix the server

If this interests you, there is also https://cdn.polyfill.io/v1/docs/ (https://github.com/Financial-Times/polyfill-service), backed by FT.

If you're using Webpack there is also a great and simple loader module here: https://github.com/deepsweet/autopolyfiller-loader

Works like a charm

> To include polyfills, use a -, otherwise, use a +.

That should say 'exclude', right? To avoid confusion, probably avoid "otherwise" too, spell it out "to exclude polyfills use a `-`; to include only listed polyfills use a `+`"

as a low level developer all of this confuses me. polyfills as a thing at all, multiple solutions and a service that can provide them (but doesn't actually work!)

this is why web development makes me feel bad... all this time an effort spent solve very easily and classically well solved problems in the browser, because browsers are wastelands of terrible engineering :I

Getting an Internal Server Error at https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/polyfills/polyfill.js

This is a really neat idea... when paired with the Express middleware and Babel, you could have a pretty clean ES6 app with modern browser features and still have it work on older browsers.

You don't need this if you write your app with babel. it will automatically add polyfills if needed.

No, the point of this tool is that some browsers require a polyfill, and some don't because the feature is natively supported. A transpiler like Babel cannot possibly determine that, so it has to be safe and include polyfills for all features used in the code it's transpiling, reglardless of whether or not the browser you're using already supports the feature.

A good example of this is Promises, which are supported in many modern browsers, but not all.

Yet this is exactly what babel-runtime will do for you: include all the polyfills. If you're not targetting IE8 and you don't care about Intl won't actually be that much code.

If you're using webpack you can use the code splitting feature to make sure the browser doesn't download that extra few KBs (which is presumable a trade-off between (an) extra roundtrip(s), so maybe you should just swallow those KBs).

CDNs beats packages for faster page loads, but there must be a reliable maintainer. This was paramount as I was building SaturnAPI. If anyone needs to utilize MATLAB in the cloud check it out: https://SaturnAPI.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com