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Comment by johnzim | Hacker News Reader

More devs should know about Intl - it's a great resource for a HUGE number of tasks as well as being a great way to smooth localization. I only became fully aware of it in the last 12 months, so I'd wager there's a lot of other devs who've missed out.

One helping hand is that libraries like date-fns (http://date-fns.org) use it liberally under the hood.

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I know about it, but I can't use it because it isn't supported in Internet Explorer 11:

https://caniuse.com/?search=Intl

Hopefully, more people will follow suit and ban IE11 when O365 no longer supports it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/int...

I'm one of the leaders of the ICU4X project which is a Rust implementation of ECMA-402 aiming to back client-side solutions.

We hope to eventually back SpiderMonkey (Firefox JS engine) implementation with it, but we also want to target WASM and in result expose it as a polyfill for any browser to use.

I don't know if by the time ICU4X is 1.0 IE11 will still matter, but it may be possible to compile it to asm.js and run in IE11 maybe?

Most stuff can be polyfilled. Is this not one of these?

The locale data for the polyfills can add a lot to bundle size.

https://cdn.polyfill.io/v3/url-builder/ is pretty great for this, it'll detect the browser user agent and send down the right polyfill. Ie on modern browsers it'll send down an empty response.

Well, great sometimes. Not great if you don't trust a random 3rd party to host essential client-side code for you or if you don't feel like running yet another, maybe unsupported in the future, service for the next X years.

You can always self-host it: https://github.com/financial-times/polyfill-service

True. We have an "if IE then emit polyfill.io <script> tag" call in the backend, which limits the security surface area to IE and also prevents an otherwise unnecessary extra HTTP request (we only use it for Intl). We feel that's a reasonable middle ground.

If I'd use it for all polyfills (which we should maybe consider!), we'd likely self-host the service.

Well, you either need to format dates or you don't. The idea that you won't use Intl because the IE11 polyfill adds to much to your bundle size is a bit of a head scratcher.

The issue is whether it’s worth spending that bundle size on an obsolete browser. If not, it could be reasonable to do some naive formatting on IE11 and show a message mentioning that the browser is unsupported and things may render incorrectly.

Your IE11 polyfills don't have to be in the same bundle as everything else.

date-fns actually barely uses Intl. Rather, it has custom locale files that must be imported to use: https://date-fns.org/v2.22.1/docs/I18n. There is a single intlFormat function: https://date-fns.org/v2.22.1/docs/intlFormat

Once I realized this I switched to Luxon, which is entirely Intl based: https://moment.github.io/luxon/docs/manual/intl.html

Just stumbled upon it a few weeks ago and just in time for handling some stuff in my current project!

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