JavaScript Transpiled Languages

Introduction

JavaScript is now the assembly of the web. Rather than wait on language innovation in the design by committee web standards world, many choose to use more advanced languages and tooling to develop in, that then compile to JavaScript.

Transpilers, also known as source to source compilers or transcompilers, are used to translates source code to another form of source code. They are popular and numerous, not just for JavaScript, but also for C, and many other languages. In this article I cover why they are valuable for JavaScript developers, give details on the popular ones in the community, and go over the use case workflow for each.

I’ve chosen 6 of the most popular JavaScript transpiled languages used for client web application development:

  1. CoffeeScript
  2. TypeScript
  3. AtScript
  4. ClojureScript
  5. ES6 to ES5
  6. Dart

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