CoffeeScript has its virtues. It's terse and expressive. And using coffeescript/register you can tell node to load your coffeescript files instead of looking for javascript.
But there are problems. Source maps make it easy to debug, but to use source maps you must first compile the code to javascript. This clutters up the file system.
There are other problems as well. If you configure mocha to use coffeescript tests then mocha will load the coffeescript without debug information, which means you're back to using javascript and your stack traces will give javascript lines instead of coffeescript lines.
There are solutions, but they're going to be a bit of work. The coffeescript compiler has an option, "inline" that generates source maps along with compiled javascript. The source maps can be appended to the javascript, and everything should work right.
The inline-source-map project (https://github.com/thlorenz/inline-source-map) shows how this can be done.
The coffee-inline-source-map project (https://github.com/thlorenz/inline-source-map) compiles coffeescript with inline maps.
Source maps are created by http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/sourcemap.html
Stack traces for coffee files are created by Error.prepareStackTrace, found in http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/coffee-script.html
No comments:
Post a Comment