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CoffeeScript vs ES6: What are the differences?
What is CoffeeScript? Unfancy JavaScript. CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.
What is ES6? The next version of JavaScript. Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls.
CoffeeScript and ES6 can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.
"Easy to read" is the primary reason why developers consider CoffeeScript over the competitors, whereas "ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS" was stated as the key factor in picking ES6.
CoffeeScript is an open source tool with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.99K GitHub forks. Here's a link to CoffeeScript's open source repository on GitHub.
Slack, StackShare, and ebay are some of the popular companies that use ES6, whereas CoffeeScript is used by Typeform, thoughtbot, and Trello. ES6 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1461 company stacks & 1725 developers stacks; compared to CoffeeScript, which is listed in 364 company stacks and 170 developer stacks.
This post is a bit of an obvious one, as we have a web application, we obviously need to have HTML
and CSS
in our stack. Though specifically though, we can talk a bit about backward compatibility and the specific approaches we want to enforce in our codebase.
HTML
: Not much explanation here, you have to interact with HTML for a web app. We will stick to the latest standard: HTML 5
.
CSS
: Again if we want to style any of our components within he web, we have to use to style it. Though we will be taking advantage of JSS
in our code base and try to minimize the # of CSS stylesheets and include all our styling within the components themselves. This leaves the codebase much cleaner and makes it easier to find styles!
Babel
: We understand that not every browser is able to support the cool new features of the latest node/JS features (such as redue, filter, etc) seen in ES6
. We will make sure to have the correct Babel
configuration o make our application backward compatible.
Material UI (MUI)
: We need to make our user interface as intuitive and pretty as possible within his MVP, and the UI framework used by Google will provide us with exactly that. MUI provides pretty much all the UI components you would need and allows heavy customization as well. Its vast # of demos will allow us to add components quickly and not get too hung up on making UI components.
We will be using the latest version of create-react-app
which bundles most of the above along many necessary frameworks (e.g. Jest for testing) to get started quickly.
For our front-end, React is chosen because it is easy to develop with due to its reusable components and state functions, in addition to a lot of community support. Because React is popular, it would be easy to hire for it here at our company MusiCore. Our team also has experience with React already. React can be written with ES6 and ES6 has a lot of popularity and versatility when it comes to creating classes and efficient functions. Node.js will be used as a runtime environment to compile the code. Node.js also has many different types of open-source packages that can help automate some of the tasks we want to do for the application. CSS 3 will be used to style components and is the standard for that.
Optimize-js
I will not describe this tool a lot here, because it's already good done by author on github
I just want to mention that this tool wrap up all immediately-invoked functions or likely-to-be-invoked functions in parentheses what is do a great optimization a JavaScript
file for faster initial execution and parsing (based on my experience).
The performance of application where I've introduced optimize-js
improved on 20% in a common (tested in Chrome
and IE11
).
- Clarification on Readme to the optimize-js
- Some of Nolan thoughts on the virtues of compile-time optimizations can be found in "Parens and Performance" – counterpost
Is it maintaining now? - Unfortunately, no (but feel free to send PR)
Pros of CoffeeScript
- Easy to read198
- Faster to write179
- Syntactic sugar126
- Readable104
- Elegant104
- Pretty73
- Javascript the good parts53
- Open source48
- Classes44
- "it's just javascript"35
- Compact code16
- Easy15
- Simple13
- Not Javascript13
- Does the same with less code2
- I'm jobs I'm software engineer1
Pros of ES6
- ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS109
- Module System Standardized52
- Extremly compact2
- Destructuring Assignment2
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Cons of CoffeeScript
- No ES62
- Corner cases in syntax1
- Parentheses required in 0-ary function calls1
- Unclear what will be grouped to {…}1
Cons of ES6
- Suffers from baggage1