kneden

Cool features, but they don't transpile very well (the output is much larger than the input), and require a non-trivial runtime component. Unless you're aware of the tradeoffs and have determined that the cost to your users is genuinely worth the nicer coding experience, I'd argue that it qualifies as a footgun. Having said that, I'm very interested in seeing where https://github.com/marten-de-vries/kneden goes.

The author has a beef with the ES5-compatible code that Babel emits for async/await, but you don't have to go that far. If you can get away with ignoring IE and Safari, the latest versions of Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all have native support for promises and generators, which can implement async/await style concurrency much more tersely: https://babeljs.io/docs/plugins/transform-async-to-generator... There's also Kneden (https://github.com/marten-de-vries/kneden) which, combined with a Promise polyfill, should transpile async/await into relatively clean chains of promises.

Luckily, you can downcompile to ES5 using the exact same tool: Babel. See for an example: https://github.com/marten-de-vries/kneden/tree/master/test/f... Anyway, I agree, the sooner Kneden becomes obsolete, the better!