When comparing Babel (6to5) vs Amber, the Slant community recommends Babel (6to5) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Babel (6to5) is ranked 8th while Amber is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Babel (6to5) is:
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Support ES6(Harmony)
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
Pro Plugins for custom features
Pro Future forward thinking
Pro Includes an IDE
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Pro Smalltalk is a simple, elegant, and powerful language
Pro One-to-one JS equivalent
Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent.
Cons
Con Generated ES5 is ugly and performs badly
Output looks far from handwritten ES5, is quite large with a lot of extra statements to execute.
Con Compiler is slow compared to other languages
Con Very few learning resources
There are very little learning resources for Amber outside the official documentation. Which may not be enough for beginners, especially people that don't have much experience in programming.