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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

I'm really looking forward to not having to debug my code compiled to state machines.

Is there a good way to get Babel/Webpack to emit multiple versions of your code compiled with different features enabled, then load the right bundle?

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I believe that's a goal of https://github.com/babel/babel-preset-env. There are also a few manually crafted presets on npm which target a particular environment and EcmaScript version, e.g. https://github.com/blockai/babel-preset-eslatest-node6 (I'm the author).

There's a website, polyfill.io, that does browser sniffing and sends a minimal polyfill. The source is available under the MIT license[1], it shouldn't be a tremendous amount of work to set up a bunch of different builds for different features levels, with a server in front responsible for sending the correct bundle.

[1]: https://github.com/Financial-Times/polyfill-service/blob/mas...

What you just described is what I always describe as the ideal web deployment system. Most of my dev is in C++, but I couldn't believe the inefficiency found in sniffing everything at runtime versus using what already exists to serve up different pre-compiled targets specifically optimized for all the major browser versions active in the field. It seems that products like this that span the dev workflow (compilation) / operational (sniffing server) gap are hard to get off the ground since many devs can't touch the ops side.

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