6to5 has gone a long way in a few short months, since then I've learnt a lot of about maintaining an open source project as well as discovered what I see as shortcomings in the current ecosystem and environment.
There are a lot of complaints about 6to5 not being "future proof". Many are under the assumption that 6to5 will be a stopgap solution until ES6 is supported. I don't agree. I believe that there are things that 6to5 can expand upon to not only become future proof but to potentially influence future standards. 6to5 will always be necessary if you want next generation features, whether this is JSX, ES6, ES7, whatever, support and features can be added more quickly to 6to5 than it can in browsers and environments mainly because 6to5 only has to operate on a subset of the constraints placed on vendors.
Future
Ideally I'd like for 6to5 to be a more general JavaScript of the future transpiler. 6to5 already supports Flow/JSX as well as experimental ES7 features so the name isn't even representative of the project in it's current state although it is in how it's widely used.
A JavaScript transpiler based on future standards and specifications, whether ECMAScript or not, I think is an extremely noble goal. I think there's a large use case for 6to5 beyond just ES6. Having an interopable platform to base code transformations on I think is a very powerful idea. This may mean exposing a very feature-rich core that contains transforms or even exposing a public API.
Some of the decisions will need to be extremely calculated in order to provide a concise and specific goal. I'm well aware of the technical challenges associated with this, feature creep, maintenance etc. I'm not going to put a timeline on any of this. It could be in 3, 6, 12 months, the time is ultimately arbitrary, I'm looking for more general feedback on the concept rather than when it'll be appropriate.
What now?
Please let me know your thoughts, I'm extremely eager to get as much community feedback as possible. I have thoughts on how to go about doing a lot of this, including a modular parser etc that I'll elaborate on if necessary. Thanks to everyone who decides to leave feedback and criticism!
/cc @thejameskyle @eventualbuddha @stefanpenner @gaearon @AluisioASG @ocombe @amasad @timoxley @dashed @monsanto
6to5 has gone a long way in a few short months, since then I've learnt a lot of about maintaining an open source project as well as discovered what I see as shortcomings in the current ecosystem and environment.
There are a lot of complaints about 6to5 not being "future proof". Many are under the assumption that 6to5 will be a stopgap solution until ES6 is supported. I don't agree. I believe that there are things that 6to5 can expand upon to not only become future proof but to potentially influence future standards. 6to5 will always be necessary if you want next generation features, whether this is JSX, ES6, ES7, whatever, support and features can be added more quickly to 6to5 than it can in browsers and environments mainly because 6to5 only has to operate on a subset of the constraints placed on vendors.
Future
Ideally I'd like for 6to5 to be a more general JavaScript of the future transpiler. 6to5 already supports Flow/JSX as well as experimental ES7 features so the name isn't even representative of the project in it's current state although it is in how it's widely used.
A JavaScript transpiler based on future standards and specifications, whether ECMAScript or not, I think is an extremely noble goal. I think there's a large use case for 6to5 beyond just ES6. Having an interopable platform to base code transformations on I think is a very powerful idea. This may mean exposing a very feature-rich core that contains transforms or even exposing a public API.
Some of the decisions will need to be extremely calculated in order to provide a concise and specific goal. I'm well aware of the technical challenges associated with this, feature creep, maintenance etc. I'm not going to put a timeline on any of this. It could be in 3, 6, 12 months, the time is ultimately arbitrary, I'm looking for more general feedback on the concept rather than when it'll be appropriate.
What now?
Please let me know your thoughts, I'm extremely eager to get as much community feedback as possible. I have thoughts on how to go about doing a lot of this, including a modular parser etc that I'll elaborate on if necessary. Thanks to everyone who decides to leave feedback and criticism!
/cc @thejameskyle @eventualbuddha @stefanpenner @gaearon @AluisioASG @ocombe @amasad @timoxley @dashed @monsanto