Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For FreeOne of the more serious concerns
about CoffeeScript is that it lacks a first-class debugging
environment. The code that you see in a browser debugger is the compiled
JavaScript, not the CoffeeScript source. Thanks to JavaScript Source
Maps, however, this long-running issue will likely be solved in the very near future.
JavaScript Source Maps is a system of references from JavaScript
executing in the browser to original source files that have been
minified, concatenated, compiled, or otherwise transformed. Chrome dev
tools evangelist Paul Irish called
Source Maps "the biggest thing to happen to JavaScript debugging in
years." The Google Chrome team is pushing aggressively toward the
release of Source Maps support (you can preview the feature in Chrome Canary).
You can read more about Source Maps in MozillaWiki feature page, in this tutorial, and in the formal proposal co-authored by Mozilla and Google. There is a Source map support plan discussion on the CoffeeScript Google Group.
Finally, Mozilla intern Nick Fitzgerald has produced a great what-I-did-this-summer video explaining the importance of Source Maps and of languages such as CoffeeScript. I recommend watching all 15 minutes of it, but for the TL;DR crowd, start around minute 11 for the sequence in which he demos an actual JavaScript console error with a link back to CoffeeScript source. Woo Hoo!
Finally, Mozilla intern Nick Fitzgerald has produced a great what-I-did-this-summer video explaining the importance of Source Maps and of languages such as CoffeeScript. I recommend watching all 15 minutes of it, but for the TL;DR crowd, start around minute 11 for the sequence in which he demos an actual JavaScript console error with a link back to CoffeeScript source. Woo Hoo!
Topics:
Published at DZone with permission of Chris Smith, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Comments