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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Seems weird to not see Google's closure compiler on a list about JS dev tools that includes a linter.

I haven't gotten around to playing with Babel or ES6, and I want to. I haven't bothered to Google it yet, but anybody have experience with Babel + Closure compiler? Is it easy, or difficult and inconvenient, or not possible?

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The Closure Compiler supports compiling ES6 code already, and can also do transpilation down to ES3/ES5. [1][2]

Google also has the Traceur Compiler which does transpilation of new JS features (ES6, ES7 proposals, and a couple of features that aren't in either) into older versions. [3]

[1]: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Releases#oct...

[2]: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/ECMAScript6#... (might be a bit out of date, since there have been releases since that document was last edited)

[3]: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler

Holy crap, I wasn't paying attention and missed that annoucement... awesome! Thanks, I have no excuse not to try it now.

Poking around, Traceur looks like something to play with and get acquainted, but not for production code just yet?

IMO, the main benefit of Closure Compiler are the type checking errors. However, it's a pretty heavy handed solution for that compared to existing tools like JSDoc + TernJS, or DefinitelyTyped TS annotations.

It relies heavily on JSDoc, and I believe JSDoc has had its time, and is on its way out (being replaced by tools like Flow, TypeScript, rtype/rfx).

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