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I recently attended a presentation on StratifiedJS and it is really cool, but as you say they do some rather aggressive source transformation. You are basically

by mpk 16y ago

I recently attended a presentation on StratifiedJS and it is really cool, but as you say they do some rather aggressive source transformation. You are basically writing in a different language and loading in an interpreter in JS to handle the new language. ObjectiveJ does the same thing. Take JS, extend it and run it through your own interpreter. It still sort-of looks like JS, but isn't. Not only do you have the overhead of loading in an interpreter but you are also left without good debugging facilities. CoffeeScript doesn't have this problem because it compiles down to readable JS, so if you're familiar with both CoffeeScript and JS you can just use native JS debugging tools to go at it. It does, however require the programmer to be familiar with both languages, so it's usually not the right choice for writing projects that you can hand off to another team at some later point.

afri 16y ago
(Disclaimer: I work on StratifiedJS) The point about not being able to use 'normal' JS debugging facilities with StratifiedJS (or other 'higher-level' languages compiling to JS) is certainly true, but IMO it is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Debugging highly asynchronous programs (whether written in 'straight' JS or in a higher-level language) with a 'normal' JS debugger isn't really much help: the callstacks that the debugger spits out in no way correlate to the asynchronous actions that are going on. Having an abstraction that sits on top of JS, as it is the case with StratifiedJS, gives us the opportunity to write a debugger that spits out stack traces that actually reflect the true causal state of your program logic. Granted, we don't have such a debugger yet, but we will in the not-too-distant future. What is already working is that StratifiedJS will amend exceptions with the correct linenumber and module name of the original StratifiedJS sources that threw the exception. So you don't have to manually correlate the generated source code with the original SJS source code, like you would need to do in systems that do a more or less 1-to-1 translation to JS.

by mpk 16y ago

afri 16y ago

(Disclaimer: I work on StratifiedJS) The point about not being able to use 'normal' JS debugging facilities with StratifiedJS (or other 'higher-level' languages compiling to JS) is certainly true, but IMO it is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Debugging highly asynchronous programs (whether written in 'straight' JS or in a higher-level language) with a 'normal' JS debugger isn't really much help: the callstacks that the debugger spits out in no way correlate to the asynchronous actions that are going on. Having an abstraction that sits on top of JS, as it is the case with StratifiedJS, gives us the opportunity to write a debugger that spits out stack traces that actually reflect the true causal state of your program logic. Granted, we don't have such a debugger yet, but we will in the not-too-distant future. What is already working is that StratifiedJS will amend exceptions with the correct linenumber and module name of the original StratifiedJS sources that threw the exception. So you don't have to manually correlate the generated source code with the original SJS source code, like you would need to do in systems that do a more or less 1-to-1 translation to JS.