rauschma

Question: If a newcomer to JavaScript asked you for essential libraries and tools, what would you tell them? You don’t want to overwhelm them with too many suggestions!

Focus: language-related functionality (as opposed to browser-related functionality).

• Libraries: including, say, Underscore.js and promises libraries, but excluding jQuery et al.
• Tools: package managers, build tools, unit test tools, etc.
  • Less important: editors, IDEs. Rationale: it’s fairly obvious that you need them. There are other tools that people might not even know that they need.

OliverJAsh

webpack: http://webpack.github.io/ jspm: http://jspm.io/

Nice introduction presentation: http://peerigon.github.io/presentations/2014-07-09-MNUG-webpack/

The watch seems intelligent in that it might be tracing the dependency graph. In my test case it seems to, at least. AMD and CommonJS modules are supported out of the box. In my test I was unable to get es6-loader working (see commit in link below).

Unlike jspm, it's not a registry. Instead it resolves dependencies from node_modules (i.e. npm) by default (like browserify), although according to this tutorial it's trivial to configure which directories the module resolver should read from.

Rich-Harris

A hastily-written strawman for how bare imports could be resolved in browsers — see this convo.

rauschma

Polyfillying the standard library when using babel-preset-env

• Overview of a workflow based on env: http://2ality.com/2017/07/npm-packages-via-babel.html
• env has the option useBuiltins that helps with polyfilling the standard library: https://github.com/babel/babel-preset-env#usebuiltins

Browsers

Approach for untranspiled code (meant to be transpiled by Babel and, e.g., webpack):

• No package ever polyfills.

BartzLeon

const spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
const pandocPath = process.env.PANDOC || 'pandoc';

let args = ['-f', from, '-t', to, '-o', 'output/' + outputFile, inputFile];

let pandoc = spawn(pandocPath, args);

let error = '';
pandoc.on('error', (err) => (throw new Error(err)));