Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CoffeeScript VS GHCJS

Compare CoffeeScript VS GHCJS and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

CoffeeScript logo CoffeeScript

Unfancy JavaScript

GHCJS logo GHCJS

Haskell to JavaScript compiler, based on GHC. Contribute to ghcjs/ghcjs development by creating an account on GitHub.
  • CoffeeScript Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-31

We recommend LibHunt CoffeeScript for discovery and comparisons of trending CoffeeScript projects.

  • GHCJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-10

CoffeeScript features and specs

  • Concise Syntax
    CoffeeScript offers a more concise and readable syntax compared to vanilla JavaScript, making it easier to write and understand code quickly.
  • Less Boilerplate
    Eliminates much of the boilerplate code that is common in JavaScript, such as curly braces and semicolons, leading to cleaner code.
  • Class Syntax
    Provides a simplified syntax for defining classes and inheritance, which can make object-oriented programming more straightforward.
  • Function Binding
    Automatically binds the value of `this` to the current context in functions, reducing the need for workarounds or additional code to manage scope.
  • List Comprehensions
    Offers powerful list comprehension features, allowing developers to create complex arrays and objects more easily.
  • Syntactic Sugar
    Adds syntactic sugar to improve code aesthetics and readability, such as the `fat arrow` for functions and destructuring assignments.
  • Interoperability
    Generates clean and readable JavaScript, which makes it easy to integrate with existing JavaScript codebases and libraries.

Possible disadvantages of CoffeeScript

  • Learning Curve
    Although inspired by JavaScript, CoffeeScript has its own unique syntax and features, requiring developers to learn and adapt to a new way of writing code.
  • Debugging
    Debugging can be challenging because error messages and stack traces often refer to the compiled JavaScript rather than the original CoffeeScript code.
  • Tooling
    Although many modern tools and editors support CoffeeScript, it doesn't have as wide an ecosystem or as many support resources compared to JavaScript.
  • Performance Overhead
    The compilation step introduces a performance overhead in the development workflow, potentially slowing down the build process.
  • Declining Popularity
    With the advent of ES6 and TypeScript, CoffeeScript's popularity has waned, leading to fewer community contributions and less frequent updates.
  • Compatibility
    Certain newer JavaScript features may not be directly supported in CoffeeScript, requiring developers to wait for updates or use workarounds.
  • Maintenance
    Maintaining a CoffeeScript codebase may become increasingly difficult as the language becomes less commonly used, making it harder to find developers proficient in it.

GHCJS features and specs

  • Haskell to JavaScript Compilation
    GHCJS allows developers to compile Haskell code to JavaScript, enabling the use of Haskellโ€™s advanced type system and functional programming features in web development.
  • Code Reusability
    Developers can reuse their Haskell codebase for both server-side and client-side applications, reducing code duplication and maintenance efforts.
  • Strong Type System
    Haskellโ€™s strong static type system helps in catching errors at compile time, which can result in more robust and reliable code for web applications.
  • Interoperability
    GHCJS provides interoperability with existing JavaScript libraries and modules, allowing developers to integrate Haskell into existing JavaScript ecosystems smoothly.

Possible disadvantages of GHCJS

  • Performance Overhead
    Generated JavaScript code may have performance overhead compared to native JavaScript, which can affect the execution speed of web applications.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    The GHCJS ecosystem and tooling may not be as mature or extensive as more established JavaScript frameworks, potentially leading to challenges in debugging and developer support.
  • Compilation Complexity
    The compilation process from Haskell to JavaScript can be complex, and build times might be longer compared to traditional JavaScript projects.
  • Limited Community and Support
    The GHCJS community is relatively smaller compared to mainstream JavaScript communities, which might limit the availability of resources, tutorials, and third-party libraries.

Analysis of CoffeeScript

Overall verdict

  • While CoffeeScript introduced a lot of useful features that influenced the evolution of JavaScript itself, its popularity has diminished with the introduction of modern JavaScript (ES6 and beyond) which includes many of the features CoffeeScript provided. Developers today might prefer to stick with native JavaScript due to its widespread use and the improvements it has undergone. Therefore, CoffeeScript may not be necessary unless you're maintaining an existing codebase.

Why this product is good

  • CoffeeScript was designed to improve the readability and conciseness of JavaScript by removing unnecessary boilerplate. It provides syntactic sugar that allows developers to write cleaner and more expressive code. CoffeeScript's syntax is influenced by Python and Ruby, making it attractive for developers familiar with those languages. It compiles directly to JavaScript, enabling its use wherever JavaScript is supported, and includes many useful features such as list comprehensions, destructuring assignment, and function binding.

Recommended for

    CoffeeScript may be recommended for developers maintaining legacy CoffeeScript projects, or for those who prefer its syntax over JavaScript and are working on small projects. It might also be useful for educational purposes to understand how language features influence each other.

CoffeeScript videos

CoffeeScript Tutorial

GHCJS videos

No GHCJS videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CoffeeScript and GHCJS)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Personal Finance
0 0%
100% 100
Programming Language
100 100%
0% 0
Financial Planner
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using CoffeeScript and GHCJS. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CoffeeScript should be more popular than GHCJS. It has been mentiond 28 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CoffeeScript mentions (28)

  • Show HN: Gitdot โ€“ a better GitHub. Open-source, anti-AI, and written in Rust
    Not literally. And I would hardly say it was a matter of language superiority. I love Ruby myself. But Github was a lot simpler when it was still just a Rails app. But Rails was SSR by default, and most of the frontend was just Embedded Ruby (ERB) template files all over the place. And way back when, it was even relatively common to use Javascript supersets like CoffeeScript[1] and Opal[2]. The latter being Ruby... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]
    Surely coffeescript would have been more appropriate? [0]: https://coffeescript.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Scala 3 slowed us down?
    My personal take is this would be like JavaScript adopting an optional Coffeescript[1] syntax. It's so different that it seems odd to make it an option vs a new language, etc. [1] https://coffeescript.org/#introduction. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Ask HN: Why don't browsers just build a non-JS interpreter?
    JS isn't perfect, but it's good enough. And there is ongoing effort to make it even better. Also, many other languages compile to JS (without WASM). Notably: - https://www.typescriptlang.org/ - https://coffeescript.org/ - https://clojurescript.org/ - https://www.transcrypt.org/ I wrote https://multi-launch.leftium.com, which is only 6% JS. The majority is Svelte (65%) + TypeScript (27%). ( - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Vanilla+PostCSS as an Alternative to SCSS
    As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
View more

GHCJS mentions (4)

  • Secretly introduced rust in my company, now they love it!
    There is a fork that compiles to js https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs compiler, and I believe the official glasgow compiler is working towards also supporting js/wasm (although I don't think they are supported as of yet). Source: over 3 years ago
  • Is GHCJS stuck on GHC 8.6.5?
    Default branch on ghcjs github is 8.6. 8.10 is a wip with commit from around a month ago. Source: over 5 years ago
  • Why Do We Need Transpilation into JavaScript?
    At present, here at Typeable we develop frontend in Haskell and use the web framework Reflex and the functional reactive programming (FRP). The source code in Haskell is transpiled into the JavaScript code using GHCJS. - Source: dev.to / over 5 years ago
  • Why supporting all programming languages is a bad idea
    In theory it is possible to write applications that run in the web browser in Java or C# or C++. There are compilers to compile Java to JavaScript or C++ to JavaScript/WebAssembly and a C# runtime that runs in the browser. In practice these technologies are very niche and only used for very few applications. The Cardano Wallet Daedalus is written in JavaScript even though most of the software for Cardano is... Source: over 5 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CoffeeScript and GHCJS, you can also consider the following products

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.

Mint - Free personal finance software to assist you to manage your money, financial planning, and budget planning tools. Achieve your financial goals with Mint.

Diggernaut - Web scraping is just became easy. Extract any website content and turn it into datasets. No programming skills required.

Fay - A proper subset of Haskell that compiles to JavaScript - faylang/fay

eScraper - eScraper is an eCommerce data scraping tool that collects data from multiple sites and prepares a relevant .csv or excel file with all product info for your stores, whether its, PrestaShop, Magento, WooCommerce, or Shopify store.

ReasonML - ReasonML is a new face to OCaml that--when coupled with BuckleScript--makes web development easy...