macros.coffee

Since sweet.js code can't be directly run in the browser, you need some "compiling" or "interpreting" step. It's not obvious why this is any different from a compile-to-js language that had support for macros. For example, someone wrote a macro system for coffeescript: https://github.com/mrluc/macros.coffee Related discussions: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3171 https://github.com/gkz/LiveScript/issues/328

Holy cow. It's built on macros, and macro-friendly! And I can use it with the node.js ecosystem! As a guy who built his own npm-installable macros.coffee, [0][1][2] I am torn. I love macros enough that I felt I needed to have them in JS-family languages, which have few metaprogramming options outside of tricks on 'this', which is why, when I saw that CoffeeScript had clean syntax and a relatively clean AST, I made it my "learning node/npm" project to add them. On the other hand, my project is simple because it depends on a fragile hack: running a deep-copy on a chunk of AST for 'quote'. It's a fragile hack that jashenkas could break with a single well-placed closure, and as I promised on my project page, "If you want to ... build a substantially more 'heavy-duty' implementation, I'll probably end up using yours." This isn't an implementat