Show HN: Kneden – Transpile ES7 Async/await to ES6 Promise Chains (Babel Plugin) (opens in new tab)

Meh, the ES6 features this needs don't need transpilation, just Promises. They're perfectly well stubbable with a library (such as Core-js or Bluebird) so you don't actually need to transpile stuff "again" to ES5.

But note that it's shipped as a babel plugin, so you shouldn't even need to care.

What this really is is "use the currently-most-popular JS transformation toolchain to transform cool-JS to works-in-browser-JS". Whether part X is in the ES6 standard and part Y might end up in ES7 is really mostly besides the point.

Or just don't use this. Wait until these language features are natively supported. It's your choice. There's no need to be frustrated by something that you don't use.

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!

Or you can stick to ES5 like I do, and just use typescript definitions to help you with code validation and type checking. The problem is frameworks pushing a lot of non standard features, like Angular does, on the premise that it might be part of the spec one day. That's a dangerous bet.

The beauty and goal of Babel and it's plugins is you can use future JavaScript today, and when that future JavaScript is now considered today's JavaScript, you can remove Babel and your code just works.

This isn't like TypeScript or CoffeeScript where you're always transpiling.

Don't forget to sprinkle in JSX and TypeScript, so that transpilers have to support the cross product [ES5, ES6, ES7] X [JS, JSX] X [JS, TypeScript].

Or don't use undeveloped language features until they're available. I'm very happy with the subset of ES6 available on node, but I never shared the complaints many people have of "callback hell". It's really not difficult to deal with and adding promises doesn't magically make it better, I've seen my share of promise hell.

Promises have decent support (http://caniuse.com/#feat=promises) so there are certainly circumstances where you don't even need to use a polyfill.

Author of Kneden here. If generators are avaiable, you should probably indeed be using this.

If they are not though, Kneden will generate code that's probably more readable and smaller (no polyfill except for a Promise implementation).

The end result is more comprehendable than the regenerator output, but the code is still modified quite a bit to fit into a Promise chain structure. Some statement types (like loops) more than others (like a simple function call). I haven't paid special attention to source maps and the like yet apart from what Babel itself generates (which is quite a bit), so there's probably still quite a bit to gain here.