The latest version of CoffeeScript has been released with more robust parsing and support for ES6 generators.

CoffeeScript code compiles one-to-one into JavaScript and this is its claimed big advantage.

The official CoffeeScript website (http://coffeescript.org/) says the language aims to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly from CoffeeScript, and the compiled output remains readable, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript runtime, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

However with the soon to be announced next version of JavaScript ES6 many of the things that CoffeeScript supplied are going to be standard in JavaScript. Many think that the time has come for this improved scripting language - but  not in a good way. Perhaps making the move back to JavaScript easier is indeed its best feature for the future.

The support for ES6 generators in CoffeeScript 1.9 is welcome news, as this is a feature the developers have been keen to add.

A generator is simply a function that yields.

An example of a generator in use in CoffeeScript is:

perfectSquares = ->
num = 0
loop
 num += 1
 yield num * num
return
window.ps or= perfectSquares()

Parsing has also been made more robust, and error messages have been improved for strings and regexes — especially with respect to interpolation.

The developers have also changed the strategy for the generation of internal compiler variable names. The release notes say that that this means that ‘@example’ function parameters are no longer available as naked ‘example’ variables within the function body.

The final main change to this release is to the REPL. This is now compatible with the latest versions of Node and Io.js.

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