You are absolutely right when it comes to using ECMAScript 6 natively. It will officially become a standard in mid 2015. By then modern browsers should have implemented most of it, but it will be years until legacy browsers go away. It feels to me that (for most projects) we can just now rely on ECMAScript 5 being there everywhere.
On the other hand, there are already a few decent solutions for transpiling ECMAScript 6 to ES5 [1]:
* Traceur (there are Traceur-based plugins for Grunt, Gulp, browserify, webpack, etc.): https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
* 6to5: https://6to5.org/
* es6-transpiler.js: https://github.com/termi/es6-transpiler
Using those tools results in a workflow that is much like using CoffeeScript.
[1] http://www.2ality.com/2014/08/es6-today.html
In ECMAScript 6: new OOP features besides classesgoogle
traceur-compiler
JavaScript2013–2021
google / traceur-compiler · Archived
traceur-compiler
Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler
27Distinct people
28Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
8.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
For anyone interested in trying some of this stuff out (which I highly recommend, because a lot of the new stuff in ES6 is really great), Google has an awesome tool called…
kevincennis used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:53 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year28 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-04-01 06:30:58 UTC to 2021-05-11 06:51:27 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
What is Traceur?
Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler that allows you to
use features from the future today. Traceur supports ES6 as well as some experimental ES.next features.
Traceur's goal is to inform the design
of new JavaScript features which are only valuable if they allow you to write
better code. Traceur allows you to try out new and proposed
language features
today, helping you say what you mean in your code while informing the standards process.
JavaScript's evolution needs your input.
Try out the
new language features.
Tell us
how they work for you and what's still causing you to use more boilerplate and
"design patterns" than you prefer.
What now? What can Traceur do for me?
Read the
Getting Started
page to get up and running. You can use some language features right now and
even try it out in your browser
here.
Just type in some code and see what Traceur produces. For an idea of what is
available and what we have in the pipeline, see the
Language Features
page.
The JSConf 2011 presentation of Traceur describes the goals of the project and
what it can do today. Some documentation is on the wiki on this site.
Extra demos are in the source repository.
We also presented Traceur at NodeConf 2011. The video is
available on YouTube.
Questions, suggestions, and comments can be directed to the
discussion group.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
12 sourcesUsing .ec6 as file extension for ECMA 6 source codes
1 points · Open discussion> Angular 2.0 relies heavily on ES6 features and syntax which are not yet supported in any browser
Which is why part of the project is a compiler which compiles ES6 (actually, an ES6 superset) to ES5, which is supported by every browser.
https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
In Angular 2 CoreFWIW, I believe they are using traceur-compiler. https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
If you look at this page here https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler/wiki/LanguageFeat...
You can see annotations in the "experimental" features list.
In AtScript PrimerHow is this different than the already well established Traceur compiler? https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
In ESnext – Tomorrow’s JavaScript syntax todayAccording to http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/, absolutely no browsers support JavaScript Modules yet; only the Traceur compiler[1] and EchoJS compiler[2] do. I would not call this feature “crucially important” yet.
[1] https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
[2] https://github.com/toshok/echo-js
In JavaScript ModulesTraceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler
1 points · Open discussionWhile a lot of browsers are still lacking pretty much any ES6 support, you can get around this by using Traceur [1] to compile your ES6 javascript down to ES5, and then using the es6-shim [2] for new ES6 libraries (Promise, etc.)
Given that you'll need to compile dart down to JS for it to run on any browser (including chrome), and given that it seems unlikely Mozilla will ever include a dart VM, I'd say that starting to learn ES6 now is probably a better long-term bet than learning dart. Which isn't to say Dart isn't a nice language...
[1] https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
[2] https://github.com/paulmillr/es6-shim
In I ported a JavaScript app to DartIMHO, the answer is: let the language evolve to it's newer versions.
And if you need this newer versions today, this is what I think of a good approach:
Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler
https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
In Why TypeScript Isn't the AnswerThere has been added a lot of new features to the browser, but the core language (EcmaScript) has not evolved much for a while.
* Overview: https://rawgithub.com/whatwg/html-differences/master/Overvie...
The next thing is JavaScript "next" or Ecma Script 6
* http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proposals
You can use Traceur if you want to try out ES6 features today
More info: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
These days there is a lot of things going on in the tooling section
Build:
* Grunt: http://gruntjs.com/ - a lot of grunt- tasks at http://npmjs.org/
* Newest kid in town: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp
Modulization and dependency management:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CommonJS
* http://browserify.org/
In A Reintroduction to JavaScript