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Comment by grayrest | Hacker News Reader

So in looking at the Kangax tables when the next Safari comes out, it looks like all major desktop browsers will have support of the big ticket ES6 features (arrow functions, destructuring, default params, Map/Set/WeakMap, Proxies). Unless you're doing JSX, type annotations, or upcoming stuff (async/await, decorators, object spread, class properties) you can drop transpiling from your dev workflow and only do it for prod.

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I thought IE11 and earlier have none of these features right? And you can't run Edge on windows 7 right? And aren't more than 50% of windows sill Windows 7? And in't windows still 90% of the market?

I was thinking these features are still 5+ years away unless you are prepared to actually ask your users to switch to Chrome.

Transformation of most ES6 features into functionally identical, backwards-compatible ES5 is trivial, and automated tools exist to do that, so you absolutely can use them today.

For example, default arguments are purely syntactic sugar for `if (arg === undefined) { arg = x; }` in the first line of a function. Still, I'd much rather write ES6's declarative `function foo(arg=x) { }` syntax rather than imperatively implement it in ES5 each time I need it.

Absolutely agree, I was just confused by "all major desktop browsers will have support of the big ticket ES6 features" but I didn't think IE10 or 11 were getting any of these features.

> I need it.

Need is a strong word.

In this case, "need" refers to the "if (x === undefined) { x = y }" pattern. Which is absolutely a need when implementing functions with variable arity.

If I need that pattern, I'd rather write it declaratively than imperatively. :)

Variable arity is exactly the thing to which I refer. It isn't needed.

Technically, default arguments don't <em>quite</em>, <em>purely</em>, desugar exactly into that -- there are some scoping complexities to them as well (possibly only for functions having strict mode code), the details of which I haven't fully internalized. Your observation is otherwise correct with a little bit of handwaving. :-)

> windows still 90% of the market

Of all the people on the web, or target audience of your website, or what market?

I just checked my own stats. Chrome 62%, Safari 18.5, Firefox 10% Internet Explorer 3%

Well, not completely, other devs who are working on the same project might not enjoy debugging why X isn't working on a certain browser.

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