ES6 or JS2015 is finally here!

Short post this time. I have been away from the Javascripot space for a little while, but now I have started a new NodeJS project.

I am incredibly excited about the wide spread adoption of ES6 this year and I have to say that VS Code has just made me incredibly happy. Not only does VS Code give ES6 intellisense but by telling the IDE that you wish to compile in ES6 you can stop it giving red squiggly lines as well. Fantastic stuff. Just add a jsconfig.json file with the following:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "target": "ES6"
    }
}

The only bad news is that surely I have to remember which features have actually been implemented by the V8 engine.

Well again I was very happy to discover that there is not a great deal left. The only proviso is that you have to run node --harmony which something you can alias in you command line runner of choice.

The other option is to run babel. In the end I have settled on doing the following :

• npm install babel  
• Add require(("babel/register") to the server.js file

The advantage of this approach is that I do not have to remember to write a custom build script with the correct parameters.