Basically I need to be able to write TypeScript code in my IDE (this introduces great ease to development), compile it to ES6 and then apply babel.js (as all browsers doesn't support most ES6) to get the resulting ES5 scripts.
Is this possible? How can I achieve this?
Yes.
You can target TypeScript compiler to ES6.
For example add this to your command line args:
--target es6
Yes, You can.
Either by adding --target es2015, or by adding target to Your tsconfig.json:
{
"compilerOptions": {
"target": "es2015"
}
}
Supported options for target are:
There are a lot of more config options. You can explore them here: Compiler options
Some options are only allowed in tsconfig.json, and not through command-line switches.
You can use typescript to write pure ES6 and then transpile to ES3 or ES5. Since typescript is ES6 plus goodies.
See it as using Less to write your css, you can write pure CSS in a less file and it will compile just fine.
For typescript 1.8 language spec:
TypeScript is a syntactic sugar for JavaScript. TypeScript syntax is a superset of ECMAScript 2015 (ES2015) syntax. Every JavaScript program is also a TypeScript program.
TypeScript syntax includes all features of ECMAScript 2015, including classes and modules, and provides the ability to translate these features into ECMAScript 3 or 5 compliant code.