Writing ES6 today with jstransform

April 21st, 2014. Tagged: JavaScript, tools

So there's this recent open-source project from Facebook called jstransform. It's also used by ReactJS. It lets you explore ES6 features and not only explore, but use them in production code.

All you need to do is add the transformation to your static resource pipeline. (Of course you have one, right, for minification and so on)

I took an example from the readme of the project, added all the available transformations and ended up with a simple little script (available on github).

As a background information, the different transforms are available in the visitors/ directory, they are task-specific, e.g. one adds support for classes, one for fat-arrow functions and so on. I simply included them all. The result is a small command-line utility you can add to your process. How?

Install jstransform

$ npm install jstransform

Get my little es6r script

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stoyan/etc/master/es6r/es6r.js > aaa.js

It's pretty simple:

var jstransform = require('jstransform');
var fs = require('fs');
 
var visitors = [];
[
  require('jstransform/visitors/es6-arrow-function-visitors'),
  require('jstransform/visitors/es6-class-visitors'),
  require('jstransform/visitors/es6-object-short-notation-visitors'),
  require('jstransform/visitors/es6-rest-param-visitors'),
  require('jstransform/visitors/es6-template-visitors')
].forEach(function(visitor) {
  visitors = visitors.concat(visitor.visitorList);
});
 
var es6maybe = fs.readFileSync(process.argv[2], 'utf8');
var es5 = jstransform.transform(visitors, es6maybe);
 
console.log(es5.code);

Start transforming

There are a few examples to get you started

E.g.

Arrow functions

(MDN)

var empty = () => {};
 
var a = [
  "We're up all night 'til the sun",
  "We're up all night to get some",
  "We're up all night for good fun",
  "We're up all night to get lucky"
];
 
var a3 = a.map( s => s.length );

Transforming...

$ node es6r.js examples/arrow.js

The result:

var empty = function()  {};
 
var a = [
  "We're up all night 'til the sun",
  "We're up all night to get some",
  "We're up all night for good fun",
  "We're up all night to get lucky"
];
 
var a3 = a.map( function(s)  {return s.length;} );

Classes

class Monkey {
  constructor(name) {
    this.name = name;
  }
  see() {
    return 'see';
  }
  do() {
    return 'doo';
  }
}
 
var monkey = new Monkey('Monkey');
 
console.log([
  monkey.name,
  monkey.see(),
  '-',
  monkey.name,
  monkey.do(),
].join(' '));

After transformation...

 
  function Monkey(name) {"use strict";
    this.name = name;
  }
  Monkey.prototype.see=function() {"use strict";
    return 'see';
  };
  Monkey.prototype.do=function() {"use strict";
    return 'doo';
  };
 
 
var monkey = new Monkey('Monkey');
 
console.log([
  monkey.name,
  monkey.see(),
  '-',
  monkey.name,
  monkey.do(),
].join(' '));

As you can see the transformation tries to protect line numbers and identation.

Thanks!

There are more examples to explore and you can start getting a taste of ES6 today. You may or may not like it, but at least you can decide by writing code, not just based on gut feeling 🙂

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