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Are there cross compilers that can take more modern JavaScript and transpile it down to the older version to make it more comfortable for developers?

• sbuttgereit 8y ago
  The answer is: possibly. I've thought of toying with TypeScript, for example, in this way; some while ago (years) when I looked, it looked like it may well let me target the versions of ECMAScript that QtScript uses. I would expect to have to deal with some misses in that process, but it did look feasible. I ended up not pursuing this because, while I think it would make a much more sane development experience, I don't think I'd interest other more mainstream JavaScript devs (or aspirants) to make sojourns into ERP-land and at the same time I would likely write code much more difficult to understand for those few other people that work this niche as well; also, a substantial portion of the work (upwards of 60%) is in SQL and PL/SQL flavors... again a barrier to many JS devs. I feel I owe it to my clients to leave the code serviceable by those others that have experience working in this environment should I decide to stop doing this work (or they decide not to like me anymore :-) ). On balance, the cons of a transpiling approach outweigh the pros unless I was able to get our community to shift "best practice" to more modern standards; the ISV that produces the ERP is highly conservative, not terribly forward looking, and has a good case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and the other practitioners are not exactly the highest level developers... so at the end of the day I don't think I'd get any traction in mitigating the risks of such a change while only really achieving a little more comfort for myself. Good news for me is I do other stuff that this ERP developer thing... :-)