Anyone who’s developing in JavaScript knows the extremely useful features that have been creeping into Node and different web browsers. They also know the frustration of determining which features are supported and the pain of forced polyfills and code transformations tacked onto our build processes.
At Coffee and Code, I’ve been doing quite a few projects involving AWS Lambda which provides a Node.js runtime, but I kept having to look up whether I could use a specific ES6 feature or not.
How do I find out what features are supported and which I’d require something like Babel for?
Kangax provides a great resource for determining what features are supported in different JavaScript environments. However, they only show the major versions of Node.
node.green is a fairly new resource that focuses on more releases of Node and also utilizes the Kangax test suite, but they don’t list results for older versions of Node.
That’s why I built whatdoeslambdasupport.com, a website to quickly see what tests pass or fail for each Node runtime that AWS Lambda supports.
The tests results are generated by running the Kangax tests inside each of the Node.js Lambda runtimes so there’s no “it works on my machine” issues with the test results.
You can use this resource to determine what JS features you can use in your Lambda projects, or to make a call whether including something like Babel makes sense.
If you’re interested in hearing more about how I’ve used Lambda for client projects, I’ll be speaking at Pittsburgh TechFest and Erie Day of Code over the next couple weeks. Stop by and say hello!