

MoonScript v0.2.0 Released - Arkeus
http://leafo.net/posts/moonscript_v020.html

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MartinMond
Together with <https://github.com/luvit/luvit> this can be pretty awesome.

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keyle
Very interesting indeed. Any alternatives to Coffeescript?

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MartinMond
What do you mean? MoonScript is to Lua what CoffeeScript is to JavaScript.

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keyle
Sorry, I meant exactly that - do we know of any other languages than
"Coffeescript"ish languages that convert to either javascript or lua? - thanks

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roestava
Yes, Dart. It's a Google sponsored language that's shaping up great.
<http://www.dartlang.org/>

Dart goes beyond what CoffeeScript offers. For instance, Dart can use a lot of
library code and try to produce a final script that ships only the methods
your program uses.

Dart has many parts to it. There's a Dart Editor that uses Eclipse as a
foundation but actually strives to be a lightweight editor. The Dart compiler
shipped with the Dart Editor is the more stable one in my experience, but it
tends to produce scary JavaScript at the moment. If you tell it to produce
"optimized" JavaScript it will try harder to make the final script smaller,
but it isn't too pretty. The Editor will get some good debugging features
soon.

Then there's a new compiler that's still being developed for Dart called Frog.
It actually produces much more decent JavaScript code.

And there's a VM for Dart that's useful for testing and developing smaller
scripts that can run without the browser. There's a promise that the VM will
be integrated with a branch of the WebKit browser component which should help
with making use of the VM in a browser environment. Maybe next week we'll get
a first version of it. (I speak as a user.)

As they say, the sky is the limit. I'm excited and have written thousands of
Dart code, much of which has been converting my JavaScript library code to
Dart.

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sigzero
You might like it but almost every write up I have read has not been nice to
Dart.

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roestava
I do like it. It compares well with my Ruby code which is saying a lot. :-)

A lot of years ago when I started with Ruby, one of the first things I cared
about was how easy it was to write OO in Ruby. I like it perhaps even better
in Dart. Ruby has features that Dart will never have, not to mention that once
Dart is released it may stop evolving, whereas Ruby that has evolved so much
will continue to do so.

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LeafStorm
While some of the features MoonScript provides are very interesting, I'm not
sure it's really needed as much for Lua as CoffeeScript is for JavaScript -
Lua is a rather nice language on its own.

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leafo
Lua is actually pretty verbose. The MoonScript codebase is about 1700 lines of
MoonScript and it compiles up to 3k lines of Lua (and that's without
whitespace and comments)

Things like classes, comprehensions, and other syntactic sugar really do help
with writing concise and easy to read programs.

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evanlong
THE FOUNDER OF APEDICK.COM IS AT IT AGAIN

