Cleaning node_modules of outdated polyfills

Even if you use the Current or LTS version of Node.js, many popular packages still drag along outdated polyfills — all the way back to Node.js 4. They often end up in a project as dependencies — for example, eslint-plugin-import, eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, eslint-plugin-react. This increases the size of node_modules, slows down installation, and even slows down code execution. This is because some of these polyfills are used instead of native APIs, even if they are already available in the runtime environment, which reduces performance unnecessarily.

nolyfill is a CLI tool that automatically finds and replaces outdated polyfills with safe placeholders.

⚠️ It will not work for you if your project runs on a version of Node.js lower than 12.4.0 or if you are developing for an environment that does not support ECMAScript2019.

Usage

npx nolyfill // Finds polyfills in the current project
npx nolyfill install // Replaces them with stubs

If you frequently change dependencies, add a call to nolyfill to postinstall so you don't forget to run it:

// package.json
{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "npx nolyfill"
  }
}

A modern stack requires modern solutions. nolyfill is an easy way to free your project from the legacy of old dependencies and take a step towards modern, fast, and clean JavaScript.