Adding this[0] list of languages that compile to JavaScript to the list. There seem so many that no matter your taste in syntactical sugar there should be something for you.
[0] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...
In From Markdown to remote code execution in Atomjashkenas
coffeescript
CoffeeScript2009–2025
jashkenas / coffeescript
coffeescript
Unfancy JavaScript
181Distinct people
274Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
16.6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Unfancy JavaScript
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Deno + Coffeescript? I mean it runs Typescript natively, so why not my favorite flavor of javascript, too? https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/5150
danschumann used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- gkz/livescript · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- satyr/coco · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- emscripten-core/emscripten · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year274 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2009-12-24 21:07:22 UTC to 2025-11-10 07:58:51 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 4 | 9 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 67 | 7 | 60 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 45 | 7 | 38 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 45 | 11 | 34 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 28 | 1 | 27 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 3 | 18 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 3 | 12 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
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CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript.
Installation
Once you have Node.js installed:
# Install locally for a project:
npm install --save-dev coffeescript
# Install globally to execute .coffee files anywhere:
npm install --global coffeescript
Getting Started
Execute a script:
coffee /path/to/script.coffee
Compile a script:
coffee -c /path/to/script.coffee
For documentation, usage, and examples, see: https://coffeescript.org/
To suggest a feature or report a bug: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues
If you’d like to chat, drop by #coffeescript on Freenode IRC.
The source repository: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript.git
Changelog: https://coffeescript.org/#changelog
Our lovely and talented contributors are listed here: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/contributors
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
12 sourcesA source map is the ability to say, for every character in a minified JS file, "Which source file did this character from? Which line and column?"
Note that there are a few types of source maps that vary in quality, so sometimes you don't get accurate column info. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qYxqOqD...
The cool thing is, it's really easy to throw together a toy language with first-class debugging and tooling, thanks to sourcemaps. See coffeescript and lightscript for two ecosystems to emulate.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/blob/master/src/so...
http://www.lightscript.org/
In What is a Source MapYou can also see on the "Contributors" graph a major increase in CoffeeScript contributions in the past year or so: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributor...
A bunch of people helped out: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/CoffeeScript-...
And GeoffreyBooth coordinated the effort, posting regular status updates & calls for help, handling bugs / feature requests, etc. I didn't realize he was also writing most of the code!
CoffeeScript2 started with a manifesto at https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss which turned into a cooperative effort with jashkenas to move CoffeeScript forward in a responsible way. An interesting story in its own right.
In Announcing CoffeeScript 2In open source, it's lovely, and fairly rare, to see someone pick up the ball on a quiet project, and run with it to completion without getting frustrated or losing interest first.
Geoffrey Booth — with big assists from Simon Lydell and Chris Connelly — has really gone the distance here, spending a full year working on drafts of CoffeeScript 2.0 to upgrade it from a language designed around ES3, to make it as ES6+ friendly as possible.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/commits/master
He also redid the website and the docs for good measure: http://coffeescript.org/
Bravo.
In Announcing CoffeeScript 2Uh... does this list of "languages that compile to Javascript" count? :) https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...
More specifically, Emscripten seems to be exactly what you're describing: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
In Ask HN: Can JavaScript be treated like machine language?Actually if you still really want JSX in CoffeeScript, it's now built in: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/pull/4551
In Decaffeinating a Large CoffeeScript Codebase Without Losing Sleep> The tooling is the best.
No, it's really not.
Have you tried other ecosystems? You should. If clojure is the best tooling you've ever used, look around, there's a wide world out there.
Heck, even the article linked above from lambdaisland lists tooling as one of the issues clojure suffers with.
> I mean, what are the options?
Haxe. Dart. Typescript. Elm. Scala. LivesSript. ES6. CoffeeScript. Flow. PureScript. ...
There must be what, 50 odd listed on https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...
...but I mean, even if we accept that the things you say about clojurescript are true (and I don't agree that they are, but even if I did), the point I'm making is that it doesnt stand out from the crowd in terms of features.
Nothing you've described is something that would be missed particularly using say, typescript, webpack a
Read the rest
nd npm.
I know it's a parody but:
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...
In Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)I'm pretty happy developing in TypeScript these days, it at the stage where its more than good enough for most tasks.
Just like the JVM is more than Java, JavaScript is the bytecode of the browser. There is plenty of languages which compile to JavaScript if you want a different style or expressiveness in your code.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...
How good the tooling is (maturity, source maps etc) for other transpiled languages may vary a lot but there is still a lot of choice. I'll be sticking to TypeScript for now.
In Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from JavaScript?No.
NodeJS (V8) is slower than Racket in many benchmarks:
https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/measurements.p...
https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/measurements.p...
Note that Racket is not even in the top 5 for most Scheme compiler benchmarks:
https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html
There are a bunch of Scheme implementations in JS, none of them are benchmarked in the previous link: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...
JavaScript is a really shitty language to target because it has very few performant control structures and terrible data types (you need ints and good arrays). Scheme also has first-class continuations, which cannot be implemented efficiently in JavaScript. Even if you leave out continuations IMO it is impossible to make a performant transpiler for most langua
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ges that targets JavaScript.
This is a very valuable article about what it would take to do such a migration. I also work on a large CoffeeScript + React codebase (https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc), write a lot of new CoffeeScript every day, and I have no plans to do a rewrite. I just don't see the value of doing a rewrite, given how hard it would be. I like CoffeeScript, find it expressive, and I think it would be easier to fix or maintain the relevant CoffeeScript tooling than to do a rewrite (just because a rewrite would be so damned difficult). Also, CoffeeScript really is sufficiently close to Javascript, and it interoperates effectively enough for now.
CoffeeScript is not totally dead. There's pretty regular activity this month (see https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/commits/master).
That said, personally, I find the stability of CoffeeScript to b
Read the rest
e kind of nice, considering how much churn there is in the rest of the Javascript world. The language barely changes at all, and that's kind of nice.
> It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web.
That's plainly wrong.
The list of praticals client-side language on the web is actually pretty vast: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu....
Of course you can't write a piece of, say, typescript, and just include it in your HTML and call it a day.
You need to compile it first, and you need some tooling for that, but it's not different from using a C++ compiler for building a Qt application.
> Every time I try to get someone to explain it to me I'm just met with a bunch of empty answers like "Yeah it just flows really well man".
Well, actually it flows really well indeed :)
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