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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

Will any of the browser makers implement implicit text/coffeescript support? That'd be neat.

Firefox is definitely going to have CoffeeScript debugging support in the future, though it's not yet clear exactly what form that'll take.

It's an open, actively-worked-on ticket -- and it's not just CoffeeScript debugging support. It's proper line + column number mapping for anything that compiles to JS.

It'll be a boon for straight-up minified JS as well.

Is this speculation or confirmed?

As Jeremy says, it's an active ticket, and Brendan Eich himself has assured me that he's committed to it.

Not much use unless they all implement it...

Might be more interesting if V8 would support CS as an input language to compile natively in addition to JS -- this would have CS "natively" in Chrome and Node.

But then, things work fine as they are. Compiling CS to JS is not a huge performance hit and it's either part of your build chain or a one-off hit at your apps startup.

That wouldn't be useful except for debugging. You can already do this if you also include the compiler. You'd never want to include uncompiled coffeescript in production, it can't be minified to the extent that js can.

What exactly do you mean by "can't be minified to the extent that js can"? Why is that? CoffeeScript files are usually about 1/3 smaller than corresponding JS to begin with.

Well, I meant that whitespace is significant in coffeescript whereas it isn't in javascript. You have a point though, coffeescript isn't nearly as wordy as javascript so it's much less code.

The impact of whitespace on size has to be almost eliminated with gzipped transmission, too - it's about the least entropic content in your code.

I just think it'd be nice to have another scripting language for the web after all this time of JS being the sole king. And I think CS would be great because it's still very similar.

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