[spankalee]

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera all support ES6. That's the current version of all major browsers.

But, I'm not arguing that web sites should only serve ES6 to browsers, only that packages should be distributed as ES6 and the app should be responsible for compilation.

[Silhouette]

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera all support ES6. That's the current version of all major browsers.

No, it isn't. For a lot of web developers, two of those aren't major browsers at all and you've missed the 800lb gorilla. You're also ignoring older versions of mobile browsers, the current Firefox ESR, and at least one other browser that has a larger market share than several of the above in parts of Asia, among other things.

But, I'm not arguing that web sites should only serve ES6 to browsers, only that packages should be distributed as ES6 and the app should be responsible for compilation.

And consequently, the entire community has to start incorporating a heavyweight build process that relies on third party tools just to use modules from the de facto standard package repository, and everyone also has to take extra time checking the exact requirements for every module they directly or indirectly depend on to make sure their build process supports it. In an ecosystem with absurd levels of microdependencies, which is certainly what we have today in JS world, the last thing we need is moving goalposts on the basic assumptions that everyone makes. This sort of thing is exactly why proper, long-lived standards are important as the foundation of a productive development ecosystem.

[spankalee]

Yes, "current version" specifically doesn't include "older versions", that should be uncontroversial.

Not sure the 800lb gorilla you're referring to, but maybe UC Browser? That thing is so odd it's difficult to know what it supports, and it's not supported in nearly any popular CI service. I'm sure all kinds of things are broken on it, but you can still compile your app to ES5.

And ES6 _is_ a proper long lived standard. I'm not sure what would be more standard.

Compiling dependencies is not that heavyweight, especially when there is no configuration. Babel and TypeScript are fast. The results can be cached, it can be done on the fly for dev servers. Requirements shouldn't need to be checked - I'm not advocating for distributing code using decorators or class properties, nor modules (which without the HTML spec on module specifiers isn't a fully functional spec anyway) just plain ES6.

ES5 and ES6 classes cannot coexist on the same proto chain. Compiling to ES5 prevents things like mixins being usable against ES6 superclasses, so you force all dependents to be ES6. If you're going to force one way or the other, force in the future direction where there's still the option to compile the whole app to the older version of JS. ES5 classes can't extend subclassable built-ins like Array, Promise, Set, Map, HTMLElement, Error, etc. ES5 is now mostly slower than the equivalent ES6, it also doesn't minify as well as ES6.

[rk06]

>Not sure the 800lb gorilla you're referring to

Are you kidding? she/he is talking about IE.